Sickert in Venice at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
If your idea of bliss is taking Escher-like escalators into the bowels of the Jubilee line, then trying to coax train information from lounging attendants at London Bridge station, then listening with ears peeled to muffled station announcements that send you scurrying several platforms over to leap aboard an outgoing train that you hope is for Dulwich, where you arrive to be greeted by 500 narrow steps to climb, so that on entering the Dulwich Picture Gallery you are actually grateful to be offered a wheelchair for a tour of paintings shrouded in doom and gloom by an artist who may or may not have been a murderer - then this is your show.
The gorgeous, innovative and serene Dulwich Picture Gallery in its bucolic landscape of people-friendly green parks is hosting a show, under the astute eye of the curator Robert Upstone, of the Impressionist Walter Richard Sickert's paintings of a decade of trips to Venice, 1895-1905.
President Obama has a fondness for the gallery, rumour has it. The Vampire Club of London thought it was their kind of show, and came en masse to the opening with fangs newly sharpened. The day I was there the gallery was crowded with contemplative viewers who tolerated my insistent wheelchair and with groups of well-behaved schoolchildren. (“His feet are very dirty in that painting,” commented a seven-year-old art-lover.) The Dulwich is famous for its outreach programmes.
You've probably heard the rumours - the speculation that the Camden Town artist might have used his pallet knife for more than applying paint - ie, for lacerating the bodies of prostitutes. Some, such as the crime writer Patricia Cornwell, have him down as Jack the Ripper and are calling for a DNA check across the century. What evidence is there? Well, simply from the casual observer's viewpoint, quite a lot. There's no denying that Sickert had a morbid point of view. If not a murderer, then a sufferer of seasonal affective disorder. Surely Venice was never as dull-hued as this. The greens are fungal, the turquoise sky foreboding; he's in love with black...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
The gorgeous, innovative and serene Dulwich Picture Gallery in its bucolic landscape of people-friendly green parks is hosting a show, under the astute eye of the curator Robert Upstone, of the Impressionist Walter Richard Sickert's paintings of a decade of trips to Venice, 1895-1905.
President Obama has a fondness for the gallery, rumour has it. The Vampire Club of London thought it was their kind of show, and came en masse to the opening with fangs newly sharpened. The day I was there the gallery was crowded with contemplative viewers who tolerated my insistent wheelchair and with groups of well-behaved schoolchildren. (“His feet are very dirty in that painting,” commented a seven-year-old art-lover.) The Dulwich is famous for its outreach programmes.
You've probably heard the rumours - the speculation that the Camden Town artist might have used his pallet knife for more than applying paint - ie, for lacerating the bodies of prostitutes. Some, such as the crime writer Patricia Cornwell, have him down as Jack the Ripper and are calling for a DNA check across the century. What evidence is there? Well, simply from the casual observer's viewpoint, quite a lot. There's no denying that Sickert had a morbid point of view. If not a murderer, then a sufferer of seasonal affective disorder. Surely Venice was never as dull-hued as this. The greens are fungal, the turquoise sky foreboding; he's in love with black...