A Free House!: Or, The Artist as Craftsman

"Sickert was Austrian-Danish-British, a great European figure. He was a follower-student of Degas, knew Whistler very well, and they were almost competitors for a time. He wore very loud suits, was a great dresser-up and loved being a kind of artist rascal, always against the establishment, as he saw it. The London establishment was peculiarly stuffy in his day, roughly from the 1890s to the 1930s. And he wrote brilliantly. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter His book A Free House is a selection of his writings. He calls the bluff on Roger Fry for example, who in the early 1900s was forever earnestly proselytizing for Cézanne, while Sickert came out fighting, questioning everything including Cezanne. That’s very much Lucian’s style, too. His exaggerations and his scorn, and his general larking around in verbal form is something perhaps not to emulate but certainly to admire. Like Sickert, he liked to taunt received opinion. A side benefit of being a painter of people is that you enter this very close relationship, literally speaking. A portrait sitting is one-to-one, occasionally one to two or three and rarely more. It’s somewhat like going to one’s private doctor – exclusive, confidential and intimate in every sense. Lucian, like Sickert, had this rogue male aspect. It’s special to painters, I suppose, because painting a portrait is investigative really. The best portraits are the ones that are less clean or clear-cut, less obvious and more imaginative, even speculative in style, and therefore much more questioning of the personality that you are sitting in front of and working from."