Venice in London – Sickert paintings at the Dulwich gallery

ickert is a fascinating artist. Not one I always like – his Camden paintings show a grubby side of life that may have integrity, but can be depressing, and he doesn’t have the wild verve of a Francis Bacon, for instance.

But he pretty much brought impressionism to England, building on the work of his teacher, Whistler. His English paintings are famed for their sombre colouring and even drabness.

However, he was a real cosmopolitan – son of a Danish-German father and English mother, born in Munich, and trained in Paris as well as London. He lived in Venice for an extended period, and painted throughout his stays there, and it’s on this period that the exhibition concentrates.

His series of studies of San Marco have been compared to Monet’s studies of Rouen cathedral. They’re all at dusk, when the sun falls on the western facade, but they’re all at different phases of dusk, with different light and colour.

But as Sickert got to know Venice he seems to have exhausted the ‘tourist views’ and started looking instead at alleyways, the sides of buildings rather than the facades, at strange slanting views. For instance he paints the horses of St Mark’s seen from below, on a diagonal, flaring with gold against the sky. It’s a vision of Venice caught in the corner of the eye – very different from, say, Canaletto’s ideal views, in which the viewer is an omniscient God who sees everything at leisure.

Some of the paintings, like one of the Rialto bridge, are horrible daubs – the quality of the work seems uneven. But at his best, Sickert has flickering brushwork and tongues of flaming colour, which almost become abstract paintings rather than ‘views’. He’s gone a long way beyond the painting as postcard.

Flickering brushwork, tongues of flaming colour, make this a vision of a city that is not solid, but phantasmagoric. Shifting light and shimmering water. (You never see a reflection in this water – the ripples break up the reflection, creating instead abstract patterns of colour and light.)

Instead of ‘Italian sunshine’, Sickert paints rain and darkness. True, during one of his trips to Venice it rained torrentially, and he was confined to his apartment despite buying expensive high boots to try to cope with the floods, but there is something in his vision that is about the dark side, the things that are at the corner of your eye, the things that you don’t see. Perhaps the most striking picture in the exhibition is one of St Mark’s Square by night – the campanile rearing up against a black sky.

This isn’t just an exhibition about landscape. It was also while in Venice that Sickert met, and started to paint, a couple of Venetian prostitutes. They told him dirty stories and sat for him, together, in pictures which start to show a new approach to painting with their slabs of colour and focus on tone. These do remind me very much of some of Lucien Freud’s work – and they’re the paintings which show the way forward to his later work.

This is an intriguing exhibition. My interest was really piqued by the mention of Venice, but not so much by Sickert – but it’s interesting seeing the way he takes a city already well known in art (painted by Canaletto, Guardi, Turner, Whistler) and, looking at it, sees something quite distinctive and very different from what other artists have seen before.

Where: Dulwich Picture Gallery, College Road / Gallery Road, Dulwich (West Dulwich or North Dulwich overground stations)

When: To May 31, Tues-Friday 10-5 and weekends 11-5.

How much: £9 full price – this includes admission to the permanent collections, which usually costs £5