Maxton as “Hamlet”

Location

Country: Germany
City: Berlin
Place: British Embassy

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.

People

Andrew John Maxton Cruickshank (1907 - 1988)

Places

Subjects

Shakespeare, William, drama, actor/actress, male portrait, Camden Town Group, Danish, man, 20th century costume, robe, tudor cap, Prince, chair

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Walter Richard Sickert (1860 - 1942)

Title

Maxton as “Hamlet”

Date

c.1939-1940

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 82.50 cm, width: 36.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Leicester Galleries, January 1960

Inscription

bc: Sickert

Provenance

Consigned by the artist to Leicester Galleries, London, on 12 April 1939; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in December 1959, as ‘Mr Maxton as Hamlet’

GAC number

5041