Roquefort

Roquefort is one of a series of still life subjects that Walter Sickert painted at home in Envermeu in Normandy between 1919 and 1920. The painting comprises the top of a plain wooden table seen slightly from above, upon which sits a plate of Roquefort cheese covered with a circular glass lid. A bone or wooden handled knife lies on the table partially hidden under the plate. The composition is completed by a bottle of white wine with one glass poured out beside it.

During the summer months Sickert liked to escape from London and take a break from his exhausting schedule of writing, teaching and exhibiting by painting landscapes in Dieppe. In 1912, he and his second wife Christine found a permanent base at Envermeu, a village around ten miles south-east of Dieppe, ‘ideal, sheltered & sunny’.1 The Villa d’Aumale was ‘a beautiful little house, nice proportions’ with separate, quiet work rooms which Sickert used as a studio.2 The house and location were well suited to his needs, being within easy reach of Dieppe and the Channel but also somewhat secluded, situated in a charming valley close to the picturesque forest of Arques. He wrote to his friend Ethel Sands:

The Sickerts sojourned at the Villa d’Aumale during the summers of 1913 and 1914 and intended to repeat this pattern each year, but the outbreak of war interrupted their regime and they were not able to return for five years, the longest period Sickert had spent away from France in his adult life. In 1919 they made plans to settle near Dieppe permanently. Sickert was finding it increasingly expensive to live in London, and wished to be able to paint unhindered by his busy city lifestyle and to complete work in his own time without being pressed by his dealers. To this end, in early 1920 Christine bought the Maison Mouton at Envermeu, ‘an old house constructed of timber & cowpats ... which has been a gendarmerie, a horse-dealer’s, an Inn & has till Easter a farmer as tenant’.4 Sickert immortalised the moment of purchase in a painting, Christine Drummond Sickert, Née Angus, Buys a Gendarmerie 1920 (whereabouts unknown).5 For him it represented liberation from the pressures of London: