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It led him, first, to France. Sickert was the main link between European and British painting at the turn of the century: the son of a Danish father and an Anglo-Irish mother, born in Munich, fluent in German and French. When the general histories of modern art mention him at all, it's as a small footnote to the Symbolists and the Postimpressionists, like Bonnard (the nudes in bedrooms) or Toulouse-Lautrec (the music-hall scenes). But one needs to remember that Sickert was slightly older than most of these painters. He was born in 1860; they hardly influenced him at all. The men who did were pre- rather than Postimpressionist: Whistler, Manet and, above all, Degas. Sickert had worked for Whistler as a studio assistant in the early 1880s, and Whistler gave him a letter of introduction to Degas. A strong friendship grew up between the two men.
Just as Whistler honed Sickert's taste for art-world polemics and politics, so his long association with Degas steered him away from being a provincial Impressionist, grazing on first sensations. Construct in the studio, do studies, mistrust "the tyranny of nature." And if you want narrative, why not have it? The world, especially the city -- for Sickert was an intensely urban painter -- was crammed with narratives, and like Degas, Sickert found his in closed rooms and places of popular entertainment. For Degas's cafes concerts, Sickert substituted the British music hall, then at its apex of rowdy success.
He loved the stage; British paintings like Gallery of the Old Bedford treat the worn, overloaded gilt-and-mirror interiors with the seriousness another artist might have brought to an Italian church. Since Sickert had spent time in Venice, there may be some subliminal connection between the clusters of audience in derby hats, leaning precariously from the balconies and reflected in the mirrors, and the more elegant crowds that thronged Tiepolo's ceilings. Sickert never condescended, and his portraits of the now forgotten stars of this dead form of entertainment are done with fine straightforwardness: The Lion Comique, 1887 (patter singers in white tie were known as "lions" or "mammoths" in the stage argot of the day), with his baggy tails and painted backdrop of a lake, is seen as precisely as any Manet.
Sickert's pictures of seedy domestic boredom, violence and the aftermath of murder seemed much more problematical, and they still do. In 1907 a blond prostitute was found with her throat cut in a rented room in Camden Town. This killing, close to Sickert's London lodgings, gave him a subject. Through 1908-09, he painted a series of harsh, dark images of a naked woman on a bed and a clothed man -- shades of Manet's Dejeuner! -- glaring down at her. In L'Affaire de Camden Town, 1909, she seems to be alive but cowering from him; with its sexual frankness (disconcerting to taste in 1909), heavy claustrophobic patterning and leaden light, it is a sinister painting, like a Vuillard whose domestic narrative has gone wrong. It isn't surprising to learn that Sickert was interested in the story of Jack the Ripper. But the truly bizarre twist was the rumor that sprang up 20 years after Sickert's death -- that he actually was the Ripper himself. Alas, there is no evidence for this bit of urban mythology.