WORK OF THE WEEK: Walter Richard Sickert, Portrait of Victor Lecourt, 1921-4

British artist Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was one of the central figures in avant-garde artistic groupings in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Best known for his figurative paintings of urban life and bawdy music hall scenes, both in England and France, he also produced, for the time, shocking, yet innovative and radical images of the nude showing unidealised female bodies. He was fascinated by popular culture and the potential notoriety of celebrity; he was even, falsely, linked to the Jack Ripper murders.

Portraiture occupies a minor role in his oeuvre, and his approach to portraiture says so much about him as a painter and a man and for this reason I have chosen this wonderful depiction of Victor Lecourt, a hotel proprietor from Dieppe in Normandy where Sickert spent many years working. Sickert is often referred to as a painter’s painter because of his fascination with the myriad approaches to manipulating paint enabling him to create almost abstract effects as he depicted the figure. This is a masterful exercise showing his visceral engagement with the expressive powers of light: the back of Lecourt’s suit and the outline of his beard almost seem like neon outlines, and light bounces off the gold patterns on the wallpaper motifs behind him….and look at the blazing mirror -like reflection of the sun on the table by the window.

Portraits for Sickert were more akin to stories on a tiny stage, with the real star being the power of paint. As the writer Virginia Woolf said: ‘Sickert always seems more of a novelist than a biographer’. Each element of this portrait is like a short story, unforgettable, and mesmerising.