Walter Richard Sickert, born in Munich in 1860, was an eccentric painter of the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He was born into a family of artists, but his father disapproved of the painting. His father was of Danish-German descent, his mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Sickert's sister Helen Svanvik grew to become a famous feminist and pacifist. After moving to England Walter Sickert decided to pursue an acting career for the time being. He got to know the British theater actor Sir Henry Irving and took on smaller roles with him. A few years later he changed his mind and worked in the artist's workshop of James McNeil Whistler and studied painting with Edgar Degas in Paris.

Sickert preferred to depict ordinary people in their habitual environment in his paintings. He painted scenes from the concert and theater life, the theater audience and worked as a teacher in evening classes. The artist was married three times. After his divorces he lived in Venice, Dieppe and Paris. In 1911, Sickert founded the art group Camden Town with post-impressionist artist Harold Gilman. Before the outbreak of the First World War, he had contact with the artists Pissarro, Ginner and Epstein. In 1926 he married his good friend Thérèse Lessore. A year later, Churchill's wife Sickert introduced her husband. Both got on well, whereupon Sickert painted a portrait of Winston Churchill. In the final phase of his work, the artist used Degas photographs and motifs of old Victorian paintings as the basis for his paintings. He continued his literary and teaching activities.

Noteworthy is the fact that Walter Sickert's name often coincides with the identification of serial killer Jack The Ripper. For the first time both names find common mention in 1976. Sickert's interest in the murderer was well known. It was said that he had rented a room where Jack The Ripper had been staying. He painted this room and gave the painting the title "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom". When a prostitute was killed in 1907 in Camden Town, London, the painter had lived in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene. Shortly after the murder Sickert designed four paintings in a "Murder in Camden Town" series.

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Mornington Crescent Nude, c.1907 by Walter Richard Sickert. Available as an art print on canvas, photo paper, watercolor board, uncoated paper or Japanese paper.
mornington crescent · nude · nudes · woman · women · female · beds · bedroom · bedrooms · sleep · sleeping · asleep · painterly · interior · interiors · lying · nudity · naked · Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images