Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers on art for more than half a century. His criticism is provocative and penetrating, his writing style brilliant and entertaining. The need for a comprehensive edition of Sickert's art-critical writings is overwhelming, and the texts gathered together here for the first time in one volume by Anna Gruetzner Robins, a leading expert on the subject, prove that his contribution as an art-writer was a major one in its own right. The texts are presented chronologically and supported by notes which give the information necessary to situate the figures and events to which Sickert refers.

Containing over 400 entries this collection offers much new insight into Sickert as an artist and provides valuable information about other British artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sickert was as much at home in Paris and Venice as in London: his record of conversations with Degas and meetings with other French artists, and the new provenances and exhibition histories he gives of many well-known works of art, make this book indispensable.