Lifting the curtain on another world
WHEN, in the late 1880s, Walter Sickert began painting London music halls, he brought to a genre made fashionable in the 18th century a unique insight, as well as a daringly modern focus. For, unlike his famous predecessors who painted theatrical subjects, such as Zoffany and Hogarth, Sickert had actually worked as an actor, playing minor roles in London theatres and on tour. By then a full-time painter, he was drawn to the raucous world of what was a cult attraction of Victorian working-class life. Returning each night to venues such as the Bedford Music Hall and Gatti’s Hunger-ford Palace of Varieties, he made discreet sketches and befriended the artistes. He wanted to explore progressive French ideas through his own adventurous versions of Degas’s and Manet’s, were vilified by the critics. They could find none of the ‘pictorial beauty’ that Sickert sought to express through his strangely cropped compositions, with their blurred boundaries, bold treatment of low tones and open-mouthed figures revelling in the ribald acts.
