Making a Splash: Sickert in Dieppe

Under valued, under appreciated but coming up fast, at last.




The photograph of a handsome man in his sixties, hair slicked back, hands on hips, wearing a thigh length, horizontally stripped bathing costume faces the title page "Sickert in Dieppe," a rewarding exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Cirencester.  He looks straight into the camera while knee high in the foaming waves of the English Channel off the Normandy coast. The year was 1920. In fact he might have been staring inland at the Royal Hotel on the front yet nothing about him connects him with the painting of that hotel he completed in 1894, more than a quarter of a century before. It is charming, delightful even and safe. Yet only 8 years later, still in Dieppe he painted "The Fair at Night" seen on the right. And "Le Grand Duquesnne, Dieppe" (left) one of four powerful paintings commissioned for a restaurant which the timid owner rejected. This rewarding, revelatory show gives plenty of support to those who argue that if Sickert remained in Dieppe instead of returning to England he would be far more famous than he is today. He is a much better painter than some French contemporaries who are better known (Sisley comes swiftly to mind), more highly praised and whose work sells for more money.