Sickert in Venice

Byron called Venice 'the masque of Italy', presumably in reference to its famous masked balls and fearsome reputation for revelry. But if the city did ever hide anything behind its sightseers' façades, then surely it was the English painter Walter Sickert who best succeeded in stripping away the superficial skin in order to reveal its seedy underbelly. Nothing prepares you for the darkness of Sickert's Venice, indeed the reproductions in the catalogue and on this page seem to have been considerably brightened by a designer worried that the source images were impossibly murky. Rather than 'La Serenissima' (the most serene), Sickert presents us with 'La Pessimissima', a heavy and atmospheric place not encountered in romantic literature or dreamy travelogues.

As a studio hand to Whistler, Sickert would have been familiar with his tutor's moonlit depiction of St Mark's Square, even borrowing the musical title 'Nocturne' that Whistler first applied to his Thames paintings. And while Whistler loved to paint the watery islands of the Veneto after rainfall, Sickert waited for nightfall to unpack his paintbox or sought refuge in only the dimmest church interiors. As the sun set over the Basilica, the sky would turn plum or dusky rose, bruising the architecture of its empty streets and steeping the black canals and lagoon in a Stygian gloom. In 1895 an unkind critic complained that Sickert's pictures were outshone by their frames, but their beauty is precisely in his economical use of bright highlights, which perfectly capture the glints and glimpses of an evening spent wandering the lamp-lit alleys of Venice.

The same film of dirty grey that he applied to his landscape backgrounds also obscures his Venetian figures and portraits from 1903-04. A biographical explanation for Sickert's moodiness goes that as his marriage frayed into tatters, the artist turned to prostitutes and pleasures of the night to see him through hard times. But Sickert enjoyed his lunches as much as his liaisons, immortalising the owner of the local trattoria as well as fellow diners and regulars. The painted ladies he depicted are somewhat ridiculous - his favoured model La Giuseppina looks like a cross between a geisha girl and a beehived Amy Winehouse - but the darkened interiors of his boudoir scenes, such as 'La Nera' (The Dark One), are as powerful as any of his later Camden Town 'Ripper' pictures. It's not just psychological shade that Sickert mastered in Venice, but a grip over that point at which shadows break down visual recognition, leaving other senses to take over.