Abbey Yard, Bath

Location

Country: Italy
City: Rome
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.

Places

England, Bath (place name), Somerset

Subjects

statue (as Subject), topography, genre, townscape/cityscape, Camden Town Group, man, woman, 20th century costume, shopping, shopkeeper, lamp, child, signage, public square, shop-front, street, terraced house, steps, plinth (represented)

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Walter Richard Sickert (1860 - 1942)

Title

Abbey Yard, Bath

Date

1939-1940

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 64.50 cm, width: 76.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Leicester Galleries, September 1964

Inscription

br: Sickert

Provenance

With Leicester Galleries by 1940; collection of Mrs Ricardo; from whom purchased by Leicester Galleries, London; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in September 1964

GAC number

6673