Pimlico

Pimlico (1937) at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums is among Walter Sickert's latest works, painted when the artist was in his late seventies and had settled in Bathampton near Bath after a final London period. Pimlico, the inner London district south of Victoria Station, was not among Sickert's most characteristic London subjects — he was far more associated with Camden Town and Islington — but the district's Victorian terraces and streets provided material consonant with his lifelong interest in the textures of English urban life. By the 1930s Sickert had returned to a practice of working from newspaper photographs and other reproductive sources, producing large-scale paintings derived from press images that his late wife Thérèse Lessore sometimes helped to execute. This late practice generated controversy among critics who felt Sickert had abandoned the direct observation that defined his best work, but it also produced a body of pictures that were formally adventurous in ways quite different from his Camden Town masterpieces. Aberdeen's Sickert holdings document his career across multiple decades, and Pimlico represents the late phase of an artist who continued working until his death in 1942 at the age of eighty-one.

Oil on canvas likely developed from photographic or newspaper source material, characteristic of Sickert's 1930s practice. Broad, summary handling with simplified tonal structure. The London street subject retains Sickert's lifelong interest in architectural texture and urban social atmosphere despite the changed working method.