Walter Richard Sickert

Probably Kojiro Matsukata, Japan
Private Collection, Japan

Original canvas. The work appears in very good overall condition with strong passages of impasto. Under UV light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Sickert was a regular visitor to Dieppe and seems to have made a particular effort to make the canvases that resulted from these trips 'complete and cumulated.' He also took the opportunity to make repeated versions of many of the subjects he chose to paint, and in each we see the variations in conditions offering a new approach to the subject.

The present work relates to a painting called The Elephant Poster, of 1910, now in the Freeman Spogli Collection (see Wendy Baron, Sickert Paintings & Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, cat. no.320, p.352). Both paintings show a view looking from the Arcades de la Poissonnerie which flanks the harbour and houses the fish market (explaining the row of lobster pots across the foreground), up the rue St Jean to the rue de la Boucherie. Whilst The Elephant Poster takes its title from the poster on the wall to the left, which appears to show an elephant and is probably advertising a circus, the same point in the present work is coloured differently, suggesting that it has now been pasted over with some other type of advert. However, in many of the other details the paintings are very similar.

Until its recent emergence, the existence of the present work was unknown and it has never before been published. It is thought that towards the end of the First World War, circa 1917-18, a Japanese collector visited Sickert at his studio and selected a number of the artist's works to ship to Japan. The collector was almost certainly Kojiro Matsukata, who was in London at the time. Certainly Matsukata bought from Sickert the largest version of a famous figure painting called Suspense of 1916-17 (Nippon Life Insurance Co.), which was shown in exhibitions of the Matsukata Collection in 1928 and 1957. It is therefore possible that Matsukata bought the present work from Sickert and that it too was shown in those exhibitions. 

The Matsukata Collection was broken up in 1959. Besides Suspense, Matsukata is known to have owned two further oils of Dieppe by Sickert - perhaps the present work being one of them - and a watercolour of the Rialto Bridge, Venice.  

We are grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.