Walter Sickert - The Colour Purple

Purple in paintings always gives me a thrill. If I enter a room in a gallery and purple is the dominating colour in a work of art, I gravitate towards it. Only in the past few weeks, though, have I put my finger on why. Midway through the sensational Walter Sickert retrospective at Tate Britain, I came across his painting Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris. This empty and rather nondescript street scene appeared to be eluding most of the gallery-goers. Yet its purple hues had drawn me in. Ten minutes later, I was still smiling, a Parisian flâneur lost in the middle of a muddy street in the 6th arrondissement.

Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris (1907)

'Why purple?' I thought - and I knew it was the purple that gripped me. It came to me in an aptly Proustian rush - although beware, this is quite different from a madeleine soaked in tea. I had vividly recalled the first record that I had bought with my own pocket money, and I suddenly honed in on the colour of its sleeve: a ripe, berry-like purple enclosing Duran Duran's 'Hungry Like the Wolf'. Glancing up at the Parisian back-street that was the home to John Singer Sargent's studio, the painting merged with a recollection of me carefully sliding that record out of its sleeve, gently placing the needle onto its outermost groove, and conjuring up the alluring yet sinister female laugh that sets in motion one of New-Wave's finest moments.   

'Darken the city, night is a wire'

Purple - and its tonal cousins: lilac, pink and mauve - are everywhere in this exhibition, and I found myself over and over again, favouring those particular paintings. In a room focusing on Sickert's gift for portraiture, it was The Mantelpiece and its depiction of a girl fixing her hair in a mirror that occupied me. But only after I'd spied the purple blouse that she was wearing. Reproductions don't capture the shimmer of this painting and the way in which the paint brings it to life. The mirror - they are everywhere in Sickert, both as a subject and a tool with which to paint - adds a depth, and not just in the greater sense of space that is generated, but also in how the reflected image of the girl is slightly muted. 

The Mantelpiece (1906)

Likewise, when Sickert steps outside - and despite me starting my gallery wanderings in a Parisian street, Sickert is not really remembered for plein air painting - he tends to favour a crepuscular dusk and the gorgeous light that is thrown up.  L'Hotel Royal Dieppe (1894) is bottle-stopped and flattened by a glorious mauve sky, whilst various depictions of The Facade of St Jacques, the cathedral in Dieppe, have a palette that is surfeit, either partially or totally, with pink, lilac and purple.   

The Facade of St. Jacques (1903)

Enough with the purple. It's not really doing justice to the range of one of the finest retrospectives that I've ever seen. A confession. Like an earlier experience with Rothko, I was something of a Sickert sceptic until I saw him comprehensively and in the 'flesh'. What I had come across previously, I'd given short shrift to, dismissing him as a minor painter of naked women in dingy Camden Town bedsits. The room full of his nudes - the exhibition is cleverly arranged thematically rather than chronologically - utterly changed my mind. Or, to put it differently, set me thinking about a kind of national aesthetic and sensibility, and how it might, even today, inform or embed many of our prejudices.   

The first painting that you come across in this room is Pierre Bonnard's Femme assoupie sur un lit. It sets the tone for the rest of the room and also acts as a corrective calibration for how you approach Sickert's women. I've already written about my adoration for another of Bonnard's nudes - Nu aux bas noires – and this one exercised something similar.   

Pierre Bonnard, Femme assoupie sur un lit (1899)

Sensual, arresting, and provocative - is that a white see-through negligee draped upon the woman's foot and thigh? - the details on the curator's title-plate tell us that 'the mood of Sickert's paintings is very different from the erotic charge of Bonnard's work'. I couldn't disagree more. The only thing that is different is that Sickert was English and Bonnard was French. Sickert had gone to Dieppe to learn, and that is exactly what he did. Whilst I'm not sure that the French do sex better than the English, they certainly think about sex better. Sickert's nudes may be set in less salubrious surroundings than Bonnard's - the beds might be a bit more prone to slumping in the middle, and the sheets may appear to be a little more careworn - but the erotic charge is still sovereign. Two paintings in particular match Bonnard stroke for stroke. The Iron Bedstead is sensational. 

The Iron Bedstead (1907)

As with most great painting, when reproduced or photographed, it can be hard to discern what the paint is up to, and just how important it is. Up close to The Iron Bedstead, you see how the brushstrokes caress, feather and form the woman's body, and how those gorgeous flicks of white create the 'feel' of the bed-linen. Whilst in Mornington Crescent Nude, we sense that we are at the beginning of the day, the light streaming through the window and enveloping the naked woman on the bed. I love the way that her calves and feet disappear cosily beneath the sheet, the slow casting off of the night, a wonderful halfway house between coolness and heat.    

Mornington Crescent Nude (1907)

Lest we think it's just about sex, I also think there might be some internal national prejudice in play when we come to Sickert's other great subject, the theatre. As if to underline this, the most crowded painting in this room is Edgar Degas's The Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer's Opera (1876). No matter, this leaves open the sight-lines for many of Sickert's music hall paintings. More often than not, it is the audience that is the focus of these works. Sickert would use a mirror to capture both the punters and the players. These works are both delightful and playful. L’Eldorado was my pick. Again, as with The Mantelpiece, there's that lovely shimmer, conjuring up the heady glamour and excitement of a night out. The opportunity to get closer and pick out the individual audience members revealed other surprises. A man in a bowler hat seems to be in the process of sticking his tongue out. Look at the fainter blush of red on his earlobe, too. An indication of high-spirits, anger, or titillation? Either way, our propensity for back-stories kicks in. 

Detail from L'Eldorado (1906)

Perhaps it's the music hall element, with its bawdy songs, brimming with double-entendres that feeds the snobbery. The Degas painting, after all, is focused on the stage and the orchestra pit. Furthermore, it's an opera. The audiences in Sickert's paintings also betray a certain rowdiness. Although, let's not forget that Parisian theatre-goers had a propensity to riot when they encountered something not to their taste: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and rumours of a near-riot, for instance. Whatever, it all reminded me of a recent comment about one of our 'ought to be national treasures', the singer-songwriter Jake Thackeray, and how, if he had come from the Continent, his beautifully crafted songs - a mixture of comedy, melancholy and startling observation - would be talked of in the same vein as those of Jacques Brel. "Here he is compared to Pam Ayres." For a nation that likes to big itself up, we don't half talk down or ignore some of our greatest cultural touchstones.   

Also included in the room devoted to the theatrical was The Acting Manager, another of those Sickert paintings that draw you in, before slowly revealing their secrets. Here my comparisons drifted north and across the border to Scotland, and I could not help compare it to Jack Vettriano's The Letter - or as it's currently come to be known, 'Reading the Gas Bill'. What a world of difference. With the Sickert, you feel you have quietly pushed ajar the door to the office of the dressing room, and initially you struggle to make the figure out clearly. Creeping closer, you realise that the soft glow atop the woman's head is not her coiffure, but rather her right hand. I don't have a clue what she holds in her left hand. Her exhaustion is utterly convincing. The pale green sofa looks comfortable, but at this moment in time, it offers no respite to the sitter.

The Acting Manager (1885)

'Reading the Gas Bill' has none of that slow reveal. It is forced, mawkish clap-trap. This woman isn't distressed; she's far too relaxed, far too glamorous for that. She's bored. The title - the real one - gives you all of the information, and thus the analytical rigour that you attempt to bring to the painting can only search for irony. There is none and you make a joke instead. Yet Vettriano is incredibly popular. Again, there's the creeping suspicion that our collective national sensibility falls short. 

Already, though, I sense a mocking voice striking up, ready to counter. 'What of where your piece started? How far away from Vettriano is that record sleeve?' Well, yes ... but then that's the subjective reaction of an eleven year old child revelling in the luxury of his first record purchase (a magnificent record, I hasten to add). That sleeve is, indeed, very much of its time, conjuring up a rather dated wine-bar aesthetic, a place where you might well have found a Vettriano or two on the wall. Nor would I want to invalidate any subjective reaction to a piece of art; rather, I'd attempt to objectively argue why the Sickert sofa scene occupies a much loftier realm than the Vettriano. The paint and brush-strokes alone decide that. Although I've never experienced a Vettriano in the flesh, I've been told that they are flat, lifeless affairs that are almost identical to the prints.  

Self-Portrait (1896)

I've written myself into a tangent, forgetting that this is meant to be a celebration of a wonderful exhibition and an exploration of why I find myself summoned towards the colour purple. I return for another look at where we began, the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. I described the street as empty, but looking again, there are a number of shadowy figures lurking. Perhaps the mood of the painting - its haunting purple glow - caused me to sense that I was alone. Either way, I like the idea that it has a life of its own, that it shifts depending on what mood we are in when we approach. Occupied by the colour, people dissolve into the background; and then, when we return, the spectres reappear. The painting has depth and life. And that's the impression that will abide from now on when I think of Walter Sickert's work. My prejudices - and don't forget, I came equipped with many of the ones that I'm now taking to task - have been replaced with the sense of a glorious and eclectic English artist who was a match for almost all of his French contemporaries.    

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Postscript: My caution in not elevating to elegance the Proustian rush that led me to associate Sickert and his use of purple with a Duran Duran record-sleeve, might have been unnecessary. It's not just the madeleine soaked in tea that triggers the narrator's involuntary memory. Amongst many other examples of this phenomenon is a 'cool, fusty, smell' detected in a Parisian public lavatory, that has its trigger traced to the sitting room of the narrator's Uncle Adolphe. From dainty cakes taken with tea, to urinal cakes that smell of wee?