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| Walter Sickert The Barnacle Girl (at the Café Royal, London) ca. 1919 etching British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Woman with a Fur Collar ca. 1887 lithograph British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Sally (artist's model Marie Hayes) ca. 1911 etching British Museum |
from The Building of the Ship
In the ship-yard stood the Master,
With the model of the vessel,
That should laugh at all disaster,
And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!
Covering many a rood of ground,
Lay the timber piled around:
Timber of chestnut, and elm, and oak,
And scattered here and there, with these,
The knarred and crooked cedar knees;
Brought from regions far away,
From Pascagoula's sunny bay,
And the banks of the roaring Roanoke!
Ah! what a wondrous thing it is
To note how many wheels of toil
One thought, one word, can set in motion!
There's not a ship that sails the ocean,
But every climate, every soil,
Must bring its tribute, great or small,
And help to build the wooden wall!
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1870)
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| Walter Sickert Portrait of Mrs. Jopling ca. 1887 etching, drypoint British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Venetian Model ca. 1903-04 drawing British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Marie ca. 1919 etching, engraving British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Little Sally Walters - the American Sailor Hat 1907 lithograph British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Cicely Hey 1923 etching British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Girl with a Bow ca. 1887 lithograph British Museum |
Woman Unborn
I am not born as yet,
five minutes before my birth.
I can still go back
into my unbirth.
Now it's ten minutes before,
now, it's one hour before birth.
I go back,
I run
into my minus life.
I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel
with bizarre perspectives.
Ten years before,
a hundred and fifty years before,
I walk, my steps thump,
a fantastic journey through epochs
in which there was no me.
How long is my minus life,
nonexistence so much resembles immortality.
Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster,
Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been
un ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband,
The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern.
I walk still further,
what an echo,
my steps thump
through my minus life,
through the reverse of my life.
I reach Adam and Eve,
nothing is seen anymore, it's dark.
Now my nonexistence dies already
with the trite death of mathematical fiction.
As trite as the death of my existence would have been
had I been really born.
– Anna Swir, as translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan (1996)
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| Walter Sickert Mornington Crescent - La Belle Hollandaise ca. 1919 etching, engraving British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Nude Woman looking into Mirror (Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, Paris) 1906 drawing British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Leah Pinder, a Circus Rider 1884 etching, engraving British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Dieppe - Juliette Lambert (a darling) shopping in the rue de Clieu ca. 1885 etching, drypoint British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert Dieppe - Juliette Lambert (night scene, draper's shop) ca. 1885 etching British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert L'Armoire à Glace (model, Marie Pepin) 1922 etching British Museum |
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| Walter Sickert L'Armoire à Glace 1924 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |