Walter Sickert is undoubtedly one of central figures at the advent of modern British art at the turn of the 19th into the 20th Century. At a time where all the great artistic strides were seemingly being made on the Continent, Sickert was developing his own avant-garde style that was at once an interpretation of European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and yet simultaneously unmistakably British. His legacy has been recently recognised in two major retrospective exhibitions, Sickert: A Life in Art at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (September 2021 – February 2022) and Walter Sickert at London’s Tate Gallery (April – September 2022) and the Petit Palais in Paris (October 2022 – January 2023).

Sickert turned his hand to many genres: he was an accomplished view painter, he invented his own brand of disturbing, psychological genre paintings, he painted the theatre, capturing a cast of characters on the stage and in the audience. He was also an accomplished, if unconventional, portraitist. In her 1934 essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation, Virginia Woolf concluded that the artist “always seems more of a novelist than a biographer…He likes to set his characters into motion”. This rings particularly true of this painting from circa 1906, called Louise, which belongs to a corpus of works executed in London in the years immediately after his return from the continent. In Venice he had painted airy views of the canals and in Dieppe his subject had been sun-drenched medieval architecture, but in the north London neighbourhood of Camden Town, Sickert focused his attention on dark interiors and the mercurial figures residing within. His paintings’ subjects were frequently as bleak as their gloomy palettes suggest. Sickert executed multiple paintings of nudes on metal framed beds, sometimes accompanied by other figures and often given ambiguous and disturbing titles such as L’Affaire de Camden Town and The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do for the Rent?.

Whilst our painting’s subject matter is not as sordid as these psychological ‘problem’ pictures, its composition, setting and ambiguity of subject all compare. The bust-length painting of a lady is loosely and economically composed. The palette is made up of purples, ochres and yellows, with dashes of pink to the woman’s cheek and lips. The tightly-cropped format and dark background evoke the claustrophobia of a dark, cramped interior. This interior was evidently lit by artificial (probably gas) light, this unnatural light-source giving the sitter’s skin an unearthly yellow pallor and brightly picking out in gold what are likely some beads dangling from her hat.

The use of colour in this portrait is notably subdued and sombre, with a limited tonal range dominated by earthy browns, muted greens, and dark shadows. This contrasts sharply with the brighter palettes of contemporaries like John Singer Sargent, who employed vivid hues to enhance the elegance of his subjects. Sickert's heavy impasto technique, where thick paint is applied to convey texture, adds a raw, almost sculptural quality to the depiction of Louise’s clothing and hat, a method later echoed by Lucian Freud in his fleshy, tactile nudes and self-portraits. This choice emphasizes the materiality of the paint itself, challenging the smooth finishes typical of the period.

Wendy Baron suggested in her 2006 catalogue raisonné that the sitter in this work might be one of the Daurmont sisters, both of whom regularly sat to Sickert. Jeanne and Hélène Daurmont were Belgians who arrived in England in 1906. They became acquainted with Sickert when the artist came to their assistance having overheard them asking a Soho policeman, in French, where they might buy coffee. They would go on to model for Sickert for three months in 1906 whilst working as a milliner and a charwoman, respectively. Despite this possible identification of the sitter, our painting is not, however, a portrait in a conventional sense. Sickert painted many of these tightly cropped female heads in this period, but, as Richard Shone has pointed out, none of them appear to have been commissioned portraits, but rather studies of characters and faces that Sickert found interesting. Although they have not all been identified, most of these women were of low (but not always unrespectable) social standing, with many occupying positions as charwomen or shop workers. This was in marked opposition to what Sickert referred to as the ‘fashionable flic-flac’ of flattering society portraiture, which had arguably been Britain’s greatest contribution to European art in the two hundred years previous.

There were some precedents for the type of female heads Sickert was painting during this period. An obvious source is the Dutch and Flemish old master tradition of tronie paintings. Like our picture, these tronies were typically bust-length depictions of people, not intended as portraits, but rather as displays of different facial types, expressions, ethnicities, nationalities and costumes. Shone, in his 1988 monograph, identifies a British prototype (intentional or otherwise) for Sickert’s female heads in William Hogarth’s The Shrimp Girl. Hogarth painted this rapid and vital picture of a London street-seller who, instead of a wide-brimmed Edwardian hat, wears a basket containing shrimps and mussels on her head; instead of patronising or eroticising this young woman, Hogarth created a dignified image of a nameless face in the crowds of 18th Century London. Hogarth frequently turned his back on established artistic convention at a time when the polished portraits of Thomas Hudson and Allan Ramsay were in vogue, and Sickert, who must have known this painting (it was bought by the National Gallery in 1884), achieved a similar result with this painting of a woman called, apparently, Louise, and in doing so, immediately rendered the ‘flic-flac’ of De Laszlo and Sargent superfluous and redundant.