16 There are also several still life drawings.
The eyes of ara knife in wall series#
11 The series of paintings depict simple arrangements of typically provincial French food and drink, and include Lobster on a Tray (Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery), 12 The Makings of an Omelette 1919 (Phillips Art Gallery, Washington DC), 13 Cherries in a Colander 1919–20 (on long term loan to Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford), 14 Three Herrings c.1919 (private collection), 15 and Asparagus (Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa). Sickert rarely painted still life subjects, and the art historian Wendy Baron has described the 1919–20 series, painted either at the Villa d’Aumale or at the Maison Mouton, as a reflection of ‘his sense of well-being, the happy acceptance of his domestic life during the brief time he and his wife enjoyed together in their French home after the privations of the war’. Soon after painting, the work was stacked with other canvases, face to back, probably unstretched leaving a negative impression of canvas texture that is clearly visible in areas of squashed wet impasto and small pieces of canvas and other material lodged in the surface. The white priming is strongly retained and the colours have consequently not sunk and are well saturated by the varnish. His colour range is greens and warm browns mostly mixed with white for opacity except for where deeper colour and tonal contrast was required. There is little or no reworking and no deliberate merging or sweetening (passing a dry soft-haired brush across the surface to blend colours and soften brushwork). He has applied clearly visible brushstrokes often isolated from other strokes by the white priming but sometimes merging wet-in-wet. The technique is minimal, wet-in-wet and with little preparation or working. He has then painted individual objects, the glass, the bottle, the cover, the cheese, the knife and the table surface separately, using direct local colour for the painting. Unusually, Sickert has not modified the ground and any initial sketching is very thin and tentative, perhaps just to delineate the main elements. The subject was presumably observed from life and the painting executed ‘alla prima’ (see Tate N03182). Sickert painted directly on the canvas with no preliminary drawing.