Walter Richard Sickert A.R.A.

(British, 1860-1942)

Mother and Daughter: Lou Lou I Love You 46.2 x 35.5 cm. (18 1/8 x 14 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Sale; Christie's, London, 17 March 2016, lot 27, where acquired by the present owners
Private Collection, U.S.A.

In 1908, in a letter to a friend, Sickert described the 'trompe l'œuil hat all the coster girls wear here with a crown fitting the head inside and expanded outside to immense proportions'. He was fascinated by these distinctive wide-brimmed straw hats, dubbed 'American sailors', and fascinated by the life stories of those who wore them. Two 'divine' coster girl models sat for him, almost always separately. The paintings in which one or other feature include L'Americaine (Tate, London) and The New Home (W. Baron, Sickert Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, pp.368-70, cat.no.350).

In 1911, Sickert returned to the theme of coster women in Camden Town bed-sits. He had spent the intervening period painting some of his most controversial interiors, many given the 'Camden Town Murder' title, in which he had juxtaposed a nude female figure and a clothed man within dilapidated North London bedrooms. Sickert thought of these two-figure paintings as modern 'conversation pieces' in which he exploited the psychological as well as the compositional potential. Their narrative remained ambiguous, but they implied a context both sordid and brutish. In 1911, while still gripped by the conversation piece theme, he sought a different tone. This time he chose to draw and paint his coster models together. The narratives remained ambiguous but their mood is quiet and domestic. The models dressed in their coats with moth-eaten fur collars are squashed into a shallow space, restricted on all four sides and tightly overlapping each other. In Two Women (Harris Museum, Preston) one woman sits on a bed, the other stands, while they engage in grave and intimate conversation; in a variant called The Flower Girl; Two Women (Private Collection) one woman sits on the bed staring out of the picture while the other cheekily bends over to peek behind her, in a pose which for all the world anticipates a modern 'selfie'. The present work relates closely to Mother and Daughter (ibid, pp.380-1, cat.no.368), exhibited with the Camden Town Group in December 1911. It shows the two models sitting facing away from each other on opposite sides of a bed, each wrapped up in her own thoughts.

We are grateful to Dr. Wendy Baron for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.