Walter Sickert
1860-1942
Vacerra
1912
14 3/8 x 10 15/16 inches (365 x 278 mm)
Black crayon, graphite pencil, and pen and brown ink on wove paper.
2011.33
Purchased on the Charles Ryskamp Fund.
© Walter Sickert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Notes
Watermark: none.
A leading exponent of modern painting in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sickert advocated a form of realism that would remain influential until Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. In 1905 he moved to the sordid north London neighborhood of Camden Town, where he embarked on a series of domestic interiors, seen in examples like this sheet, in which he staged ambiguous and psychologically fraught scenes between two figures---usually male and female. Vacerra is the name of the mean and petty swindler in an epigram by the Latin poet Martial.
A leading exponent of modern painting in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sickert advocated a form of realism that would remain influential until Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. In 1905 he moved to the sordid north London neighborhood of Camden Town, where he embarked on a series of domestic interiors, seen in examples like this sheet, in which he staged ambiguous and psychologically fraught scenes between two figures---usually male and female. Vacerra is the name of the mean and petty swindler in an epigram by the Latin poet Martial.
Inscriptions/Markings
Signed at lower right; inscribed at lower left: Vacerra.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings
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