At Charleston in Lewes, an exhibition celebrates the life and oeuvre of Walter Sickert. Walter Sickert: Working Notes, produced in partnership with Piano Nobile, features the artist’s drawings, sketches and prints, works on paper that were not simply preparations for larger compositions, but the very place where his ideas took shape.

At its heart, Walter Sickert: Working Notes returns to one of the artist’s most revealing statements from 1914: “The artist is he who can take something ordinary and wring out of it attar of roses.” By focusing on his works on paper, Charleston reveals the experiments through which Sickert painted the world.

Sickert remains a pioneering a modernist artist who rejected traditional beauty to capture the gritty reality of working-class urban life. Heavily influenced by his mentors James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas, he championed everyday realism. Few artists captured the tensions of modern Britain quite like Sickert. A generation older than the Bloomsbury group, so symbolic of Charleston itself, he occupied a fascinating position between Victorian tradition and twentieth-century experimentation.

In 1934, Virginia Woolf devoted an unusual piece of art criticism to him, Walter Sickert: A Conversation, published by the Hogarth Press and structured as an imagined dinner-party debate. Through her characters, Woolf arrived at a striking conclusion: Sickert was “probably the best painter now living in England.”. This is how this remarkable exhibition ‘introduces’ the artist in the show.

Before becoming one of Britain’s most influential modern painters, Sickert briefly worked as an actor, and theatre remained central to his understanding of identity and performance. He delighted in transforming his own appearance, shaving his head, adopting dramatic beards, and creating different public personas. Self Portrait as an Artist (1908) is an exploration of his many facets.

One of the exhibition’s most revealing works is his self-portrait originally titled The Man in the Bowler Hat. Sickert described it as a “punching ball”, an uncompromising act of self-examination, before later renaming it The Juvenile Lead, a knowing reference to his theatrical beginnings and his role as a leading figure within the art world.

The exhibition also brings renewed attention to Sickert’s fascination with everyday life and his rejection of the polished portraiture favoured by Edwardian society. In 1911, he founded the Camden Town Group, gathering artists committed to portraying the realities of contemporary urban experience. Rather than celebrating wealth and status, they looked towards the overlooked corners of London and beyond: music halls, cafés, pubs, modest interiors and working neighbourhoods.

Works such as Jack Ashore (1912) reveal controversy through nudity and sex, while the precise lines of the etching Cheerio (1928–1929) demonstrate his ability to celebrate the world of theatre. Despite the unsettling nature of many of his subjects, Sickert’s approach was never simply one of criticism or judgement. He observed rather than condemned.

Sickert’s drawings capture these dark environments with remarkable economy. A few charcoal marks or etched lines are enough to suggest entire worlds, quiet domestic rooms and moments suspended between action and stillness. His subjects often carry a sense of fatigue and psychological tension. His uneasy interiors, depiction of industrial life, and searching observations reflect the routines and anxieties of modern life.

The show remains on view until 11 October 2026.

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Image: Walter Sickert, Ennui, unframed Courtesy Piano Nobile