Exhibition of Walter Sickert’s works featuring at Tate Britain this April

London’s biggest retrospective of Walter Sickert in almost 30 years is coming to the Tate Britain from April.

A master of self-invention and theatricality, Mr Sickert took a radically modern approach to painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, transforming how everyday life was captured on canvas.

This major exhibition will feature over 150 of his works from over 70 public and private collections, from scenes of rowdy music halls to ground-breaking nudes and narrative subjects.

Spanning Mr Sickert’s six-decade career, it will uncover the people, places and subjects that inspired him and will explore his legacy as one of Britain’s most distinctive, provocative, and influential artists.

Highlights include ten of Mr Sickert’s iconic self-portraits, from the start of his career to his final years.

For the first time, these portraits will be brought together from collections across the UK and internationally, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Canada.

Visitors will see the variety of different personas adopted by Mr Sickert over the years – a legacy of his early life as an actor – and how his complex personality evolved on the canvas throughout his career.

Mr Sickert’s interest in the stage is also reflected in one of his favourite artistic subjects – the music hall.

His dramatic images of performers and audiences, often captured together from unusual and spectacular angles, evoked the energy of working-class city nightlife.

The exhibition will examine Sickert’s British and French music hall subjects together through over 30 atmospheric paintings and drawings of halls in London and Paris.

Although these subjects were deemed inappropriate by much of the British art world at the time, they took inspiration from the café-concert subjects of celebrated French artists such as Edouard Manet and the ballet subjects of Edgar Degas, a close friend and key influence on Sickert after they met in Paris in the 1880s.

In his final years, his work took on a new and ground-breaking form in larger, brighter paintings based on news photographs and popular culture.

These included images of Amelia Earhart’s solo flight across the Atlantic and Peggy Ashcroft in a production of As You Like It.

This pioneering approach to photography was an important precursor to Francis Bacon’s use of source material and to pop art’s transformation of images from the media, once again revealing Mr Sickert’s role at the forefront of developments in British art.

Walter Sickert is at the Tate Britain from April 28 to September 18.

Main Picture: Walter Sickert The Front at Hove (Turpe Senex Miles Turpe Senilis Amor) 1930 Tate. Purchased 1932