Walter Sickert's landscapes and townscapes of Dieppe and its immediate area, could be said to account for the major part of his lifetime’s achievement. He explored its churches, its arcaded waterfront, its main square dominated by the statue of Admiral Duquesne, its cafés, and its little shop fronts, returning again and again to the same subjects until he had exhausted their possibilities.

In this essay, I mostly concentrate on the fourteenth-century church of St Jacques, which lies to the west of the harbour and south of the Place Nationale in Dieppe, Sickert’s most frequently depicted subject. He portrayed it from various angles and in different lights, in the words of the art historian Dr Wendy Baron: 'his eye probed every stone of the façade of St Jacques as, with the diligence of an ant, he worked his way inch by inch round the church to leave no aspect unrecorded,’ painting it on canvas, card, panel and board, as well as in numerous related drawings and sketches on paper.

Of course, there is a similarity with the way Monet painted his Rouen Cathedral pictures between 1892 and 1894 - the epic culmination of nearly fifty years of research into the dynamics of light and its perception by artist and spectator.

*‘Rouen Cathedral: The Portal in Sunlight.’* (1894)

Although Sickert’s use of St Jacques as a subject began from the early 1890s and continued to the early 1930s, the majority of images date from 1899–1900 when he was a permanent resident in the town after the separation from his wife, the writer and campaigner Ellen Cobden who had discovered Sickert had been unfaithful to her for much of their marriage.

On their honeymoon in 1885, they had stopped off from their tour of European cities and rented a house on the rue de Sygogne in Dieppe. With its invigorating channel-coast climate, the town was, from the mid-nineteenth century until the disruption of World War One of the most fashionable resorts in France. Elegant hotels and a thriving Casino catered for the wealthy in society.

Huddled between the sea and the penetrating tongue of the narrow-mouthed harbour, with its bustling arcaded quay-side and its jumbled architecture articulated by the impressive churches of St. Jacques and St. Rémy, the town appealed to French and English artists alike.

The congenial café life welcomed writers as well as painters to this town, easily accessible via the Channel packet from England and by train from Paris. A roll-call of visitors to Dieppe reads like a social and cultural Who's Who of the period Gauguin: Monet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Paul César Helleu, Aubrey Beardsley, Whistler and Charles Conder,

Paul Gauguin, ‘*Women Bathing, Dieppe.’* (1885)

It was a town Sickert had known since childhood. Sickert’s mother, Eleanor, had been educated at a boarding school around twenty miles away in Néville and once the Sickert family moved to London in 1868 they spent the summer holidays in Dieppe, welcoming artistic and literary guests, including Oscar Wilde.

*‘Dieppe Harbour.’* (1885) Walter Sickert

The year of his marriage was also the year Sickert met again with Edgar Degas. They had met briefly in Paris in 1883 when Sickert was working as an assistant to James McNeill Whistler and the year in which ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,’ the portrait of Whistler’s mother was exhibited at the Salon,

Recalling this meeting after Degas’ death in 1917, Sickert wrote: ‘Whistler asked me to take charge of the picture, which I did, crossing by Dieppe. He had given me letters to Degas and Manet… and I was to say to them that Whistler was ‘amazing.’ They met at Degas’ apartment in rue Pigalle.

Two years later, Degas was staying with a friend in Dieppe and everyone was taken with him but he made a particularly strong connection with ‘the young and beautiful Sickert,’ as he called him. Degas depicted Sickert in a pastel drawing ‘Six Friends in Dieppe,’ wary-eyed and at a distance from the intimate grouping of Degas’ long-standing friends.

Degas taught Sickert a great deal, about art and about life and how to live life as an artist. He influenced Sickert's choice of subjects. Although it is less obvious to us now, most of the chosen subjects of the French Impressionists – the modern city, the ballet stage, the racecourse, the bathroom – were shocking to contemporary audiences.

Sickert’s work began to evolve; he had been working in Whistler’s way with similar tonal colouring, now he looked at how Degas composed his work and realised the importance of draughtsmanship. The friendship also exposed him more to European culture and contemporary French painting.

*‘Six Friends at Dieppe.’* (1885) from left to right: Walter Sickert, Daniel Halévy and his father Ludovic, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Henri Gervex and Albert Boulanger-Cavé,

More than a decade after this meeting, and following his separation, Sickert was again in Dieppe, at first he lodged with a local fisherwoman, Augustine Villain and her children in Le Pollet, the fishing quarter. Villain was considered a great beauty, known as La Belle Rousse for her flaming red hair and there’s uncorroborated stories of Sickert being a father to at least one of her children; to fit in with his new surroundings, in the day-time Sickert dressed as a French fisherman, at night he wore a jacket and tie.

Reluctant to let personal matters interfere with his painting, he searched for a motif to paint and perhaps deliberated for some time before painting the frontal view of St Jacques - the most fully realised version is ‘The Façade of St Jacques, Dieppe,’ (1899-1900) and like Monet and his pictures of Rouen Cathedral, Sickert’s interest is in the effects of light upon the dramatic Gothic architecture, and in particular the tonal contrast between the bottom half of the church, plunged into shadow by the surrounding streets, and the top half, lit by late afternoon sunlight.

‘*The Façade of St Jacques, Dieppe*,’ (1899-1900)

Sickert was excited by the potential Dieppe offered him and saw the opportunity to raise much needed funds (his wife had financed much of his career during their courtship and marriage) He wrote to a close friend, the artist Florence Pash Humphrey Holland, ‘this place Dieppe, is my only up to now, goldmine, and I must work at it a bit.’

One of his friends around this time was Pierre Bonnard, they shared many private collectors (including the author André Gide) and they were both represented by the gallery Bernheim Jeune, one of the most influential forces behind the promotion and sale of 19th century French painting, especially the Barbizon and Impressionist painters. Virginia Woolf reminds us that Sickert’s paintings have ‘a tangible quality; they are made not of air and stardust but of oil and earth.’

In her catalogue raisonné on Sickert, Wendy Baron writes Bonnard may have encouraged certain characteristics of Sickert’s handling of paint, the tonalities, the dominance of olive green in his colour schemes and above all, the way he built up the contours of his figures in linear smudged strokes of shadow.

A very good example of this can be seen in this work rediscovered by Wendy Baron in 2006; it is one of Sickert's earliest depictions of the central position of the west façade of St Jacques seen at the end of rue St Jacques; a painting very similar to an oil on card, I have for sale which is below the Baron painting.

Sickert’s affair with Dieppe ended in 1905 when he was persuaded to move back to London by the artist Spencer Gore. That October, he took lodgings at 6 Mornington Crescent. Soon afterwards he rented the first floor rooms at the same address as a painting studio - a dramatic bonus was his landlady's belief that the young man to whom she had let the rooms some sixteen years before was Jack the Ripper.

According to Sickert’s biographer Matthew Sturgis: ‘Sickert was conscious that scenes of London low life might appeal to the French – indeed, might be ‘a unique weapon for the Paris market.’

Since the days of Géricault and Gustave Doré, the French had been fascinated by the seedier aspects of the English capital; and Sickert was ready to be coarse – or, as he put it, ‘canaille.’ He wanted to be able to make a splash at the Salon d'Automne, the new exhibiting body, where the boldest young talents vied with each other. He wanted to impress Félix Fénéon, the brilliant poet-cum-curator, who had opened a cutting-edge art-space for the Parisian dealers Bernheim- Jeune. Fénéon planned to show Sickert there, alongside Bonnard, Vuillard, Signac and the young Matisse and so the Camden Town Group was born.

From 1906, until the First World War intervened, Dieppe again became Sickert’s summer retreat. It was around this time, he developed a particular hankering for antique or junk shops, perhaps because he was trying to earn money rediscovering lost masterpieces for his friend, the artist William Rothenstein, then working for the Carfax Gallery in London.

Sickert sent Rothenstein all sorts of paintings and drawings he had found in French junk shops, believing them to be the work of nineteenth-century masters including Delacroix, Millet, Daumier and Daubigny. His connoisseurship does not seem to have matched his enthusiasm: Rothenstein failed to sell any of Sickert's 'finds.’

In 1919 Sickert and his second wife Christine (they had married in 1913) moved to into the Villa d’Aumale at Envermeu, a village around ten miles south-east from Dieppe. The Sickerts travelled to Envermeu during the summers of 1913 and 1914 and intended to repeat this pattern each year, but the outbreak of war interrupted their hopes and they were not able to return for five years, the longest period Sickert had spent away from France in his adult life.

In 1919 they planned hoped to move near Dieppe permanently. Sickert was finding it increasingly expensive to live in London, and wished to be able to paint unhindered by his busy city lifestyle and to complete work in his own time without being pressed by his dealers. To this end, in early 1920 Christine bought the Maison Mouton at Envermeu. Sadly, Christine died there from tuberculosis in October 1920, whereupon Sickert moved back to Dieppe. Sad and lonely, he returned to London in 1922, never again to live and work in Dieppe.

The work above is one in a series of still-lifes Walter Sickert painted in 1919–20 either at the Villa d’Aumale or Maison Mouton. The series might commemorate the simple French domestic life he shared with his wife Christine at this time, despite the material hardships caused by the First World War, from which Europe was still recovering.

‘La Rue St Jacques, Dieppe,’ (c1903) featured on this page can be bought directly from me. Further details on this work and the shop page are here: https://www.richardmorris.org/shop/p/walter-sickert

The picture can be couriered (fully insured) to an address of your choice or delivered personally.

Walter Sickert, Degas, Dieppe, and the Monet factor

Vilhelm Hammershøi: the eminence in greys

Gilbert Spencer: a very English eye for landscape