WALTER SICKERT 1860-1942
The Audience and Orchestra Pit at the Old Middlesex c.1906
Charcoal crayon, pen and ink and white chalk 8 ¾ x 12 ½ inches (22 x 31.5 cm)
PROVENANCE
Agnew’s; Private Collection.
EXHIBITED
Sydney, Richard Nagy and Spink & Son in association with DC-ART, Walter Richard Sickert, Lucien Pissarro, September 1989 (cat. no.14 repr.)
LITERATURE
Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings & Drawings, New Haven & London 2006 no.282.4.
The present work is one of a small but important group of studies from 1906 depicting the audience and orchestra pit at the Old Middlesex Music Hall in the West End. These studies, taken from an high vantage point, are examples of Sickert's drawing at its most abstract and mysterious. Wendy Baron has admired these drawings for their ‘new pictorial softness and richness’ (op cit. p.61).