This thesis argues that late Sickert was as significant and
complex as the Sickert of Camden Town, and explores the richness
of the historically specific ways a major British artist’s
hitherto neglected corpus functioned. In particular, I investigate
the mediation of time and material memory in Sickert's paintings
of 1927-42. These works mix responses to contemporary press
photography with Victorian imagery from a century earlier at a
time when both were loaded with problematic political and cultural
meanings.
Late Sickert appropriated both past and contemporary mass
culture, but I stress the importance of the material conversion
of memory. The thesis argues that in his work 'time' is played
with in various material ways – from speed to delay and from the
time of historiography to the time of painting itself. Spectacle
and remembrance were critically negotiated in the space where the
materiality of paint meets the different temporal qualities of its
source images. These paintings used the material thingness of
paint to reflect sceptically on narratives of Englishness in the 1930s
