Walter Richard Sickert RA RBA (31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942) was a German-born British painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London.

Decades after his death, several authors and researchers theorised that Sickert might have been the London-based serial killer Jack the Ripper, but the claim has largely been dismissed.

[1] In 1868, following the German annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, the family settled in England,[2] where Oswald's work had been recommended by Freiherrin Rebecca von Kreusser to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery at the time.

Though he was the son and grandson of painters, he first sought a career as an actor; he appeared in small parts in Sir Henry Irving's company, before taking up the study of art in 1881.

[8] Sickert's rendering was denounced as ugly and vulgar, and his choice of subject matter was deplored as too tawdry for art, as female performers were popularly viewed as morally akin to prostitutes.

[10] Between 1894 and 1904, Sickert made a series of visits to Venice, initially focusing on the city's topography; it was during his last painting trip in 1903–04 that, forced indoors by inclement weather, he developed a distinctive approach to the multiple-figure tableau that he further explored on his return to Britain.

[12] Sickert's fascination with urban culture accounted for his acquisition of studios in working-class sections of London, first in Cumberland Market in the 1890s, then in Camden Town in 1905.

[15] For several years Sickert had already been painting lugubrious female nudes on beds, and continued to do so, deliberately challenging the conventional approach to life painting—"The modern flood of representations of vacuous images dignified by the name of 'the nude' represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy"—giving four of them, which included a male figure, the title The Camden Town Murder, and causing a controversy which ensured attention for his work.

These paintings do not show violence, however, but a sad thoughtfulness, explained by the fact that three of them were originally exhibited with completely different titles, one more appropriately being What Shall We Do for the Rent?, and the first in the series, Summer Afternoon.

The composition, which exists in at least five painted versions and was also made into an etching, depicts a couple in a dingy interior gazing abstractedly into empty space, "psychologically estranged from one another".

From 1908 to 1912, and again from 1915 to 1918, he was an influential teacher at Westminster School of Art, where David Bomberg, Wendela Boreel, Mary Godwin[20] and John Doman Turner were among his students.

Seen by many of his contemporaries as evidence of the artist's decline, Sickert's late works are also his most forward-looking, and prefigure the practices of Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter.

Sickert, separating these illustrations from their original context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligibility partly dissolved, called the resulting works his "English Echoes".

[30] He became a Royal Academician (RA) in March 1934 but resigned from the Academy on 9 May 1935 in protest against the president's refusal to support the preservation of Jacob Epstein's sculptural reliefs on the British Medical Association building in the Strand.

He experimented tirelessly with the details of his method, always with the goal, according to his biographer Wendy Baron, of "paint[ing] quickly, in about two sittings, with the maximum economy and minimum of fuss".

For his music hall subjects, Sickert often chose complex and ambiguous points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the audience, performer and orchestra becomes confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors.

[38] The isolated rhetorical gestures of singers and actors seem to reach out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering to see things that lie beyond the visible space.

The influence of these paintings on successive generations of British artists has been noted in the works of Freud, David Bomberg, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin, and Leon Kossoff.

Sickert's late works display his preference for thinly scrubbed veils of paint, described by Helen Lessore as "a cool colour rapidly brushed over a warm underpainting (or vice versa) on a coarse canvas and in a restricted range allow[ing] the undercoat to 'grin through'".

Max Kozloff wrote: "How not to say too much seems to have become a matter of utmost laborious concern for Sickert", as evidenced by his paintings' studied lack of finish and "neurasthenic sobriety" of color.

Sickert is not considered a serious suspect by most who study the case, and strong evidence shows he spent most of 1888 outside the UK,[46] and was in France at the time of most of the Ripper murders.

[53] The art critic Jonathan Jones noted: "This baffling man who was born in Munich in 1860, emigrated to Britain as a child and became one of our greatest and weirdest artists, emerges in this excellent show as even odder than I thought.