‘Re-reading Sickert’s Interiors’: Woolf, English Art and the Representation of Domestic Space

Abstract

A much-discussed topic in Virginia Woolf scholarship is the extent to which she was influenced by those artists who, from the 1960s onwards, became known as the Bloomsbury Group, by the European art, especially the Post-Impressionists, to which the Bloomsbury Group introduced her, and by the organizations whose origins were within Bloomsbury — the Friday Club, the Grafton Club, and the Omega Workshops.¹ But surprisingly the influence of Walter Sickert (1860–1942), whom Woolf and many of her friends, including Roger Fry, knew personally, has received little attention. This is especially surprising since Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were such strong admirers of Sickert’s work, and, with Paul Nash, eventually took over Sickert’s Fitzroy Street studio (W.R. Sickert 15). Woolf’s own views of Sickert’s art are well documented in her essay, ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’, which developed out of an after dinner conversation with him in 1933 and her visit in November to the major loan exhibition of his work at Agnews. However, her admiration for him dates from the first decade of the new century and, although he was less of a London presence during and after the First World War, she has left on record that at a party in January 1923, he was one of the old friends with whom she talked with especial pleasure (Lee 466–7).