The Lion of St. Mark, Venice

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was an English painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century.

Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects. His work also included portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. The famous crime novelist, Patricia Cornwell, has in recent years unconvincingly tried to prove that Sickert was the notorious serial murderer Jack the Ripper. 

An important area of Sickert's art relates to his frequent visits to Venice in the last years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th, where he was captivated by the light and its dissolving and disintegrating effect on objects and buildings. Unlike contemporary and indeed later British  masters of etching, Sickert didn't depict slightly unusual subjects in major tourist or heritage centres relatively conventionally, but did the reverse: his subject here is the very familiar Doge's Palace and Lion of St Mark on the column before it. Stylistically, his impressionistic and fuzzy etching technique corresponds remarkably effectively to his painting surfaces.

The work closely relates to a painting of almost 20 years earlier, <em>The Lion of St Mark's</em> (c.1895-6, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Typical of Sickert is his witty juxtaposition of the most conventional, Victorian typography of the inscription - the etching was printed by Carfax and Co - and his highly advanced technique, veering on abstraction, really paralleled by no-one else in Britain in his generation.

See: Wikipedia, 'Walter Sickert', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sickert

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art    May 2018