Sickert’s Brighton Beach Pierrots

The German-born British painter and printmaker Walter Sickert spent part of the late summer of 1915 in Brighton, staying near the seafront and working intensively from the life around him. The temporary pierrot stage on the shingle opposite the Metropole Hotel quickly became one of his most productive subjects. Night after night through August and September he watched the troupe’s performances, sketching from the deckchairs, from the promenade railings, and from the side of the stage. 

By then Sickert was 55, a former actor and long-established painter whose training with Whistler and friendship with Degas had sharpened his interest in theatre, gesture and the mood of everyday scenes. Brighton offered all of that in a new key: a makeshift outdoor stage, shifting Channel light and the deep backdrop of the seafront terraces. These on-the-spot drawings became the basis of his Brighton Pierrots artworks, completed soon after. Their angled viewpoints, reddish evening sky and rows of empty chairs have often been read against the wartime context. Brighton was hosting convalescent soldiers, the younger crowds were largely absent, and distant gunfire could sometimes be heard across the water. Two principal versions survive, one at the Ashmolean and another at Tate Britain, both built from the same 1915 sketches.

Sickert’s relationship with the coast did not end there. After his marriage to the painter Thérèse Lessore in 1926 he lived for a short period in Brighton before returning to London, and he continued to visit the town throughout the 1920s and 1930s. From these stays came further seafront works. The Front at Hove (1930) captures the promenade at Adelaide Crescent, with a bowler-hatted older man - widely thought to echo Sickert himself - walking beside a younger woman. Another canvas, often titled The Chain Pier, Brighton, turns to the earlier Victorian landmark and sets small figures and beached boats against the curve of the old suspension pier. Smaller Brighton pieces, including a study from Bedford Square, also trace back to his 1915 notes and later returns.

No verified photograph places Sickert physically on Brighton Beach, but contemporary press mentions in the 1930s note him among the seasonal visitors enjoying Brighton’s autumn light. Between those references and the cluster of seafront paintings from 1915 to 1930, the seafront can be seen as a recurring source of material, first discovered during that wartime summer when the pierrots took to the shingle.