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Sickert may have been an intimist, of a peculiar sort, in such paintings, but there is no doubt of his later nostalgia for the kind of public declamation that the great tradition of earlier painting could fill. "We - cannot well have pictures on a large scale nowadays," he remarked, "but we can have small fragments of pictures on a colossal scale."
Such a work was his huge self-portrait head with a patriarchal beard, The Servant of Abraham, 1929. Another, majestic in its broken dark-green underwater light, was The Raising of Lazarus, circa 1929, which he worked up from a composite photo of a life-size articulated dummy being delivered to his London studio. For by now, Sickert's interests were shifting decisively to photography -- much to the puzzlement of the London art world. Photos were common speech, immediate, iconic but not "sensitive." They stood the Impressionist cult of the nuance on its head. And turning the black-and-white of photography back into color represented a fascinating challenge for a tonal painter like Sickert.
Working from photographs -- whether specially taken for the painting or clipped from the press -- produced some of Sickert's most engrossing images. Among them are his 1929 portrait of the novelist Hugh Walpole and The Miner, circa 1935: a man just out of the pit, fiercely kissing his wife, an abrupt and passionate painting imbued with sooty grain that reminds one of late Goya. Photographs also enabled Sickert to produce, in 1936, what is probably the last portrait of a British royal personage that can claim serious aesthetic merit: Edward VIII, emerging from a limousine, clutching his black fur busby like a teddy bear. The monarch, who was shortly to abdicate, looks remarkably wan and shifty, and it's hard not to imagine that in this picture the Servant of Abraham was granted a moment of prophecy.