Les Arcades de la Bourse, Dieppe

In 1898 Sickert travelled to Dieppe in search of new subject matter. Delighted with the bustling port and higgledy-piggledy old town he wrote to his friend, Mrs Humphrey: 'this place Dieppe, is my only up to now goldmine, and I must work at it a bit'. Wendy Baron (op. cit., pp. 58-59) comments on the new freedom visible in paintings such as the present work: 'In 1900, as can be seen in Les Arcades de la Bourse, Sickert did begin to evolve a new method of treating landscape. The colours of this picture are much the same as those found in the other paintings of 1900, maroon, ochres, black, and grey, and the tonality is similarly sombre; but the strongly stated tonal contrasts are now missing. There is almost no drawing as such, although some thick smudged strips of black shadow help to indicate the architecture. The paint itself is substantial, sometimes impasted, and it is course and rather dry in texture, quite unlike the thin, smooth, glossy paint found in the other landscapes of 1898-1900'.