WALTER SICKERT. A CONVERSATION
By Virginia Woolf Graceful, charming, evocative—one knows the qualities of Mrs. Woolf's writing, and in this short essay (Hogarth Press, is. 6d.) they are displayed to their best advantage. The style is not one that lends itself to the formulation of any very precise criticism, and at the end it is not so much the art of Walter Sickert that has been revealed to us, but rather his personality. The art lends itself to literary interpretation—" I. have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters," she reports Mr. Sickert as saying. But so many sins are committed in the name of literature, above all, painterly sins. Mr. Sicked is more (or less) than a literary painter ; he is a novelist's painter. He is the painter of the school of the de Goncourts and of George Moore ; to be still more exact, he is a painter of the school of Mrs. Woolf, and that is why she can write so appreciatively about him.
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