• Philip McEvansoneya
  

• Walter Sickert
  

• 
  Autumn 2025
  Volume 42. No. 3

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A young man is seated by a window facing the viewer. To the right, a mature woman is seen in profile as she looks down on him, holding the back of his chair in an inquisitorial way, as if calling him to account. He cuts a diminutive figure next to her substantial form – an iteration, perhaps, of the conventional comedy of the termagant and the hen-pecked male. But the moment of the encounter is freighted with another kind of tension because in the foreground, prominently propped against an improvised rest, the drawer of a table, is an elongated rifle. The weapon introduces a jarring note into an ostensibly domestic scene.

Sinn Féin (also known as The Sinn Féiners) is a little-known work by Walter Sickert, the English artist of Danish-German-Irish origins, the Irish part being through his grandmother, Eleanor Henry. Sickert had a prolific and high-profile career in both painting and printmaking, depicting subjects he found in London as well as others derived from his travels in Belgium, France and Italy. His Irish-related scenes are few. In England, he is best known for his portraits and genre scenes, including a number of moody and mysterious interiors with figures and music hall subjects. Among the genre scenes is Tipperary (1914, private collection), which shows a woman playing the piano, watched by a soldier in khaki uniform, presumably singing the popular wartime song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. In fact, there are two paintings with this title, with different compositions, the second (1914, Tate Britain) lacking the soldier.

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