Sickert vs Sargent

This is the fascinating story of two of the biggest characters in art – two larger-than-life immigrants who were battling for nothing less than the future soul of British painting: Sickert, the gruff, aggressive man-of-the-people, and Sargent, the urbane and charming dandy. Focusing on some of the most beautiful and alarming paintings ever made – pictures of aristocrats and prostitutes, coronations and killings, opera houses and music halls – the programme evokes the long-lost atmosphere of Edwardian London and shows how these two artists were waging a war whose legacy still haunts us today. Sickert vs Sargent also brings together the two biggest, juiciest stories of the two artists; on the one hand, Sargent’s awful encounter with the moral codes of the day by painting Madame X with a dress strap falling down from her shoulder; on the other, Sickert’s deliberate searching out of the dark and sinister in Edwardian Britain – most famously for painting his series on the subject of the famous Camden Town Murder. “An intelligent and well-argued programme” – The Observer