Sickert's human canvas: Peyton Skipwith reviews Abbot Hall's searching exhibition of Sickert's painting, the most significant for over a decade

By major exhibition standards, the exhibition at Abbot Hall, Kendal, is quite modest, consisting of only forty-three works, but it is the most important and serious display of Sickert's paintings since the Royal Academy's 1992 exhibition, which was three times the size. Subtitled 'The Human Canvas', the exhibition contains a substantial core of those uncompromising single and double figure canvases we so readily associate with Sickert and Camden Town; indeed, on entering the exhibition the visitor is immediately confronted with a vista through to the Tate Gallery's large version of Ennui, which I have never seen so well displayed, both in regard to hanging and background. The walls have been painted a dense, light-absorbent slate green, which, although close to much of Sickert's own tonality, manages to isolate each work and, with virtually all the works behind glass, to minimise the reflections.

Subject-matter was important to Sickert and several of his abiding themes are set out in the first room--music-hall, portraits, Dieppe and Venice--whilst the second is reserved for the enigmatic figure subjects, with the third and final room showing how, in later life, he would frequently pick up old themes and subject them to fresh treatment, whilst at the same time continuing to explore new avenues.

However, pleasure apart, the real importance of this exhibition is its focus on Sickert's lifelong love affair with the matiere of paint, which he treated in many different ways, from thinly liquid to heavily impastoed. At times he would draw an outline with a delicately dancing line, at others he would define forms through nervous cross hatching, or by virtually carving them out of the shadows with a minimum of broad brushstrokes, or again, as in his portrait of Harold Gilman, subject them to a bold pointilliste treatment. Although subject and location--Dieppe, Venice, Camden Town--chart a rough line of chronology through his life, in terms of his actual handling of paint there is no sense of evolution, just an awareness that practice increased his command and enabled him to move back and forth at will, making the pigment sing in each canvas precisely as he wished.

A comparison of the handling of the 1902 Statue of Duquesne, Dieppe with Lazarus breaks his fast (above), of a quarter-of-a-century later, is most instructive. In the former, the statue of Duquesne rises boldly, an abstract silhouette, uniformly but thinly painted, against the russet roofs and night blue sky, whilst passages of the Lazarus self-portrait, especially the handling of the right hand, are equally abstract, but here he allows the paint to dribble freely, contrasting it dramatically with the broad handling and thin stumbling which define the principal forms, thus enhancing the sense of feebleness as Lazarus shakily raises his spoon.

Again and again as one goes round the exhibition one is in awe of Sickert's ability to suggest; his ability to find painterly equivalents not just through colour or shape but through texture, delectable or repulsive. The juxtaposition in room two of Le Chale Venitien and The large hat allows one to compare two very different approaches to the individual figure; the paintings are close in date and both are sympathetically and fluently handled, but the young woman in the former is treated in the manner of a Whistlerian arrangement--a motif--whilst in the latter the bare-breasted model is depicted with Hogarthian vivacity.

The quality that emerges most strongly is Sickert's originality and his conscious determination to treat life afresh, not only with regard to subject matter but, most importantly, in terms of his use of the visual language of paint and the quality of the way he expressed this through his varied handling of the pigment. He is often accused of being dark, and certainly some of his Camden Town interiors can, at first sight, seem quite sombre, but on closer inspection they are, within their own minor key, often vibrant with colour: In Dawn, Camden Town, for instance the woman's blowsy flesh is shown bruise-purple against the viridian green wallpaper, whilst in L'Affaire de Camden Town, the best-known of all the Camden Town Murder series, the left leg of the recumbent woman is hatched in a multitude of small brushstrokes in brick red, olive green, purple and grey.

In 1973 Wendy Baron devoted a chapter of her book on Sickert to the artist's problems with paint and their solution and concluded that his whole development could be interpreted 'as a series of experiments designed not only to discover the ideal handling of his medium but also to find out how far the method of painting devised to express this handling, and its outcome--style--can and cannot be programmed and systematized.' The ensuing battle between his love of the tactility of paint and his belief that the act of painting could be systematised, colours much of his work from about 1914 onwards, but also results in some of his greatest paintings, such as Brighton Pierrots--seen here in the Ashmolean's version--and the Portrait of Victor Lecourt, as well as the two late self-portraits, Lazarus breaks his fast and The servant of Abraham.