Walter Sickert

Watermark: none.
A leading exponent of modern painting in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sickert advocated a form of realism that would remain influential until Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. In 1905 he moved to the sordid north London neighborhood of Camden Town, where he embarked on a series of domestic interiors, seen in examples like this sheet, in which he staged ambiguous and psychologically fraught scenes between two figures---usually male and female. Vacerra is the name of the mean and petty swindler in an epigram by the Latin poet Martial.