Sickert in Dieppe

Throughout his life the British artist Walter Sickert (1860-1942) sustained an enduring fascination with the fashionable seaside resort of Dieppe in France. A regular visitor for over four decades and a permanent resident between 1898 and 1905, the French town played a key role in the painter’s artistic development.

From the tutelage of James Abbott McNeill Whistler in London, it was in Dieppe that Sickert became affiliated with French Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, and where he forged longstanding friendships with Jacques-Emile Blanche and Edgar Degas, both of whom were to have a formative influence on his career. Through these connections Sickert established himself as a leading proponent of Modern painting back in Britain. He continued to nurture these professional links during his summers in Dieppe, throughout the 1890s when he mixed with ‘decadent’ artists and writers such as Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde, and later when he played host to a younger generation of painters including Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman.

The painting, prints, preparatory drawings, etchings and archival material collected for this publication reveal Sickert’s breadth of subject matter – the town’s architecture, harbour and fishing quarter, shops, cafe culture and inhabitants – whilst charting the development of his pictorial technique during these sojourns in Dieppe.