Walter Richard Sickert

In previous Tate catalogues this drawing has been dated to c.1903–4. But as Wendy Baron, author of the 2006 catalogue raisonné of Sickert’s paintings and drawings, has pointed out its draughtsmanship, and the handling of paint in the finished oil version, suggest an earlier dating of c.1901.1 Additionally, this is most probably the drawing Sickert described as ‘the Pierrot and popolana’ in a letter to his patron Mrs Hulton in 1901, which he said he had sent to the Fine Art Society in London from Venice.2 Sickert’s Venetian pictures from 1901 were generally cityscapes of familiar landmarks, and the only other figure subjects he is known to have made are an oil portrait of the restaurateur and vegetable wholesaler Signor de Rossi,3 and a drawing of Mrs Hulton.4 When he returned to Venice in 1903, Sickert had an artistic breakthrough: he began depicting pairs of figures in ambiguous scenes, as in A Marengo and Le Tose (Tate N03621 and N05296). In Neuville in 1902 Sickert had experimented with making a small number of drawings of a nude model in a bedroom;5 but the setting of pairs of figures in distinct arrangements in his Venetian works was a new development. In such works, Sickert seems to deploy his models like actors on a stage, at once putting them in naturalistic poses but ones that are in fact highly contrived, thus creating dramatic tension. We might view Pierrot and Woman Embracing as some sort of transitional work in this process of evolution.

The action takes place outdoors, away from the bustle of tourist Venice. The viewer is cast almost in the role of voyeur, glimpsing an erotically charged moment of intimacy. The costumes of the Pierrot and his companion suggest this may be a scene during the Carnival of Venice, a time notorious as a period of revelry, and, in particular, sexual intrigue and licence. The masks people wore for anonymity and the relaxation of social codes concerning sexual relations encouraged a proliferation of fleeting liaisons. Traditionally, the carnival started on 2 February and ended the day before Ash Wednesday. By the time Sickert was in Venice, carnival was reportedly somewhat in abeyance, although it had perhaps not completely died out. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, pictures of Venetian working class life were extremely popular, with fisher girls being a particularly favourite subject in the Royal Academy annual exhibitions (see Tate N05296).