Saint Rémy

Saint Rémy (1910) at Hastings Contemporary is a work whose title carries immediate resonance in post-Impressionist history — Saint-Rémy-de-Provence was the town where Van Gogh was hospitalised in 1889–90 and produced some of his most turbulent masterpieces. Whether Sickert painted this work on location in Saint-Rémy or whether the title carries an art-historical allusion is a question the work raises without necessarily answering. By 1910 Sickert was fully established as the central figure of British Post-Impressionism and had recently founded the Camden Town Group, which held its first exhibition in 1911. The genre classification as 'Religious' suggests a possible representation of the church or religious architecture associated with the town, though Sickert was not a conventionally religious painter. His engagement with French provincial towns produced a series of works that share his Dieppe views' qualities of structural directness and tonal specificity. Hastings Contemporary (formerly the Jerwood Gallery) holds a significant collection of British twentieth-century art, and this painting represents Sickert's sustained engagement with French subjects even as his focus increasingly shifted to London and Camden Town. The 1910 date places it at a pivotal moment — the year before the Camden Town Group's formal establishment.

Oil on canvas with structural emphasis on architectural form. Sickert's mature tonal method — building colour from a warm ground through layered transparent and opaque passages — is evident. The composition organises architectural volumes with the directness typical of his French urban subjects.