Only until October 4th, I'm afraid. I was a bit late getting to see this exhibition but thought it could wait to be visited along with the concert below. In all the years I've lived here, I'd never been to the Pallant House Gallery before, hidden just off the main streets of Chichester's city centre. Who would have thought that it would be quite so comfortably busy towards the end of an exhibition's run but there was a lecture going on for those intent on bettering themselves, the cafe doing some brisk trade and more of the well-heeled, leisured classes interested in the bohemian painter than one might imagine.The main room in the gallery is a collection of eminently forgettable pop art by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Colin Self and others. It has to be somewhere, having been significant in its time but I'm not sure it is lasting very convincingly and these are by no means the finest examples of it. The Sickert exhibition is in a humber of rooms off the central one, organized by period and thus also by theme.
Although Sickert is primarily associated with Whistler, it is Degas that is most brought to mind by these paintings, produced while Sickert was based in Dieppe from 1898 to 1905. The church of St. Jacques is captured repeatedly from the same perspective and the architecture of shops, the hotel and churches is a substantial record of the place and time. More compelling, though, are the pictures of theatre and vaudeville. My favourite Sickert, Brighton Pierrots, is in the Ashmolean in Oxford and doesn't qualify for this selection but there are several that recall that atmosphere of louche showmanship.
Paintings of gamblers at baccarat never show the faces of the players, for purposes of discretion but also suggesting the clandestine nature of the entertainment and the dangers seen in the ironically entitled The System, a study in despair similar to that in Ennui, where the old man's gambling strategy has clearly not worked. That the same despair can be induced by gambling addiction here and by domestic circumstances in Ennui is a telling parallel in two paintings.
Dieppe Races (pictured) looks like Goodwood with the countryside set out panoramically but fixed behind the flashing, impressionistic colours of the passing race in the foreground. The sky has a feel of possibly oppressive heat, a different oppression to some of the closed-in worlds captured in other of these pictures. Again, of course, Degas painted a racehorse or two as he did theatre performers and one could wonder if while in France Sickert was doing what French artists did. While some of the brushwork is sketchy, deliberately so but still sketchy, the best of these paintings are an impressively perceptive and compelling account of Walter Sickert, who, with Alfred Sisley, represents the English contribution to Impressionism, which was a significant one if never to be the headline act of the movement.
And that, coming home in that choicest of weather, early Autumn sunshine, brings to a close my days off for the season, a bit of a rehearsal for retirement, one might think. But now it's late September and I really should be back at school.
