The Camden Town Group in Context

ISBN 978-1-84976-385-1

Walter Richard Sickert A Theatre or Music Hall Audience, ?Vernet's, Dieppe ?c.1919–20

Walter Richard Sickert 'A Theatre or Music Hall Audience, ?Vernet's, Dieppe' ?c.1919-20
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
A Theatre or Music Hall Audience, ?Vernet's, Dieppe ?c.1919–20
Ink on paper
306 x 235 mm
Tate Archive TGA 8120/3/61
Presented by Mrs Andrina Tritton in 1981, from the estate of her mother, Mrs Andrina Schweder, the sister of Walter Sickert's second wife Christine Drummond Angus (c.1877-1920)
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
As well as sketching performers on stage, Walter Sickert also commonly drew audience members. Despite the ornamentation of the theatre, the figures in this drawing are dressed in quite modest clothes, which indicates that the location may be a music hall. Previously this work has been catalogued as a drawing of Vernet’s, a cabaret café on the Quai Henri IV in Dieppe. However, other studies and paintings of Vernet’s suggest that the café was on one level, without a balcony or boxes, which would discount it as the location for this study. Sickert has drawn in ink and used it quite thickly on the figures in the middle so that it has come through on the reverse.

Helena Bonett
June 2011

How to cite

Walter Richard Sickert, A Theatre or Music Hall Audience, ?Vernet's, Dieppe, ?c.1919-20, in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/walter-richard-sickert-a-theatre-or-music-hall-audience-vernets-dieppe-r1104719, accessed 21 November 2024.