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The School of London
RELATED ARTISTS
PART 2
- Walter Richard Sickert 1860-1942
Born 1860, Munich; died 1942, Bathampton, England
From the 1880s to the 1930s, Walter Sickert was one of London's most influential artists. As instigator of the 'Fitzroy Street Group' he encouraged artists to 'seek beauty in everyday urban surroundings'. The Group formed an exhibiting society, the 'Camden Town Group'. They held exhibitions at the Carfax Gallery in central London between 1911 and 1912." - Museum of London
Summer Afternoon, c.1908-9
oil on canvas
� Estate of Walter R Sickert 2001
"Sickert was interested in the music hall, the theatrical and low life, and he played around with these themes like Degas, his mentor. He always painted from photographs, and was one of the first artists to do so." - Richard Shone
La Hollandaise, c. 1906
oil on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6
Tate Gallery, London
(click image to enlarge)
 "La Hollandaise perfectly represents the kind of painting most often associated with Sickert - a plump nude on a redimentary bedstead. Dramatic immediacy unites with gloomy dissolution. The frankness of the image within its friction of light and shadow is veiled, not from a sense of propriety but through Sickert's life-long adherence to understatement. From the momemt that such paintings as this and Le Lit de Cuivre found their mark among Sickert's contemporaries, their influence has been absorbed by successive generations of British arits, from Bacon and Freud to Auerbach, Hodgkin and Kossoff. . . The animal sensuality of the paintings is detectalbe in some of Francis Bacon's depictions of nudes, both male and female, on isolated beds and mattresses. . ."
SICKERT Paintings, edited by Wendy Baron and
Richard Shone, Yale University Press, 1992
image above: FRANCIS BACON
Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes 1963
more images:
LINKS:
WALTER SICKERT
"Miss Eahart's Arrival," 1932
oil, 71.4 x 183.2 cm
Tate Gallery, London
Wasser in der W�ste
artist index
- Matthew Smith b. 1879 (Halifax) - 1959
 "Because I very much admire Matthew Smith, I am delighted to have been asked to write something about him, although I know I will not be able to do him justice. He seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable or Turner to be concerned with painting - that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable . Painting in this sense tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brush-stroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently, every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance - mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used in this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system: continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain. I think painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down, and in this game of chance Matthew Smith seems to have the gods on his side." - Francis Bacon
above: Matthew Smith, Self Portrait, 1932, National Portrait Gallery
artist index
RUSKIN SPEAR
Self Portrait, 1932
pen, ink and pastel
Carlisle Museums and Art Gallery
- Ruskin Spear, RA 1911-1990
Ruskin Spear studied art at Hammersmith, then the Royal College of Art until 1935 when he started teaching at Croydon School of Art. He taught at the RCA from 1948 to1975.
RUSKIN SPEAR
Ernest Marsh, 1954
oil on canvas
� Royal Academy of Arts, London
artist index
  
STANLEY SPENCER
left: Self Portrait, 1914, oil/canvas, The Tate, London
center: Self Portrait, 1936, oil/canvas, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
right: Self Portrait, 1959, oil/canvas, private collection
- Stanley Spencer 1891-1959, Cookham, England
 Stanley Spencer is famous for two things. He immortalized the Berkshire village of Cookham, where he was born and spent most of his life - as a student, he was given the nickname "Cookham" because he refused to leave his village, preferring to travel to the Slade School of Art in London rather than leave home - and he celebrated sex both on his canvases and through his unconventional understanding of relationships. Late in life, "he was regarded as an artist with undoubted talent, but someone who lacked direction and a coherence of ideas."
image above: HENRY LAMB: Stanley Spencer, 1928 (NPG)
"Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece," 1936, oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
© Estate of Stanley Spencer/SODART (Montreal) source
artist index
Self Portrait, 1977, oil/canvas
Source: National Portrait Gallery
- Graham Sutherland 1903-1980
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"In the autumn of 1888 London women lived under the shadow of the Ripper murders - killings perhaps unmatched in their sadistic brutality. Florence Pash, friend and colleague of the painter Walter Sickert and herself an artist, confided to the author's mother when in her late eighties, a terrible story that she had kept even from those closest to her. Jean Overton Fuller draws on the new evidence of Florence Pash, and with her own artist's eye discovers clues in Sickert's pictures, pointing conclusively to the true identity of the Ripper..." 
