Two Coster Girls

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Born in Munich, Walter Richard Sickert was a British artist of mixed Dutch and Danish parentage. He abandoned an acting career in 1881 to briefly enter the Slade School of Art in London, before apprenticing under James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) in 1882. During a visit to Paris in 1883, he was introduced to Edgar Degas who inspired Sickert's practice of using figure and location drawings made ‘on the spot’ to produce finished paintings back in the studio. During the 1890s he chiefly painted portraits in London and townscapes in Dieppe. From 1905 he lived in the Camden Town area and in 1911 established the Camden Town group of artists. In 1934 Sickert moved to Broadstairs in Kent with Thérèse Lessore, his third wife, and then again near Bath in 1938. He received few official honours in his lifetime but a major retrospective of his work was held before his death, with posthumous exhibitions at Tate Britain in 1960, and the Courtauld Gallery, London, in 2007–2008.

Places

England, London

Subjects

genre, Camden Town Group, 20th century costume, dress, hat, coster girl

Materials & Techniques

panel, oil, oil painting

Artist

Walter Richard Sickert (1860 - 1942)

Title

Two Coster Girls

Date

c.1907-1908

Medium

Oil on panel

Dimensions

height: 35.50 cm, width: 26.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the Fine Art Society, May 1979

Inscription

none visible

Provenance

Collection of painter Vanessa Bell (née Stephen; 1879-1961); collection of Mrs Angelica Garnett (daughter of Bell); possibly with the Leicester Galleries, London; from whom purchased by the Fine Art Society, London, in August 1973; from whom purchased by the Department of the Environment in May 1979

GAC number

14531