1860-1942
The Audience and Orchestra Pit at the Old Middlesex
Ref: 1081
Pen and ink with black crayon and white chalk, 22 by 31.5 cm
Provenance: acquired by the previous owner from Agnew's in 2004
Exhibited: Sydney, Richard Nagy and Spink & Son in association with DC-ART, Walter Richard Sickert, Lucien Pissarro, September 1989, cat.no.14, (ill.)
Literature: Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings & Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, p.331, cat.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).