La Rue Pecquet, Dieppe, France

'La Rue Pecquet, Dieppe, France' from 1900 belongs to the long period Sickert spent in Dieppe, the French Channel port that became central to his artistic development. Sickert first visited Dieppe in 1885 at Whistler's suggestion and returned repeatedly over the following decades, eventually living there for extended periods in the 1890s and early 1900s. The town offered him exactly what he sought: a French environment in which the legacy of Degas and Whistler could be absorbed at close quarters, but also a specific visual world of narrow streets, painted facades, and the particular light of the Channel coast that he found inexhaustibly paintable. 'La Rue Pecquet' depicts one of Dieppe's characteristic streets with the directness and confidence of a painter who knew his subject intimately. By 1900 Sickert had spent years building his understanding of French Post-Impressionist approaches to colour and light, and his Dieppe street scenes show a freer, more chromatic handling than his London interiors of the same period. The Birmingham Museums Trust's holding of this work reflects British institutional collecting of Sickert's French subjects, which were widely admired in England as evidence of his sophisticated European sensibility.

Oil on canvas with the outdoor handling of Sickert's French period, freer and more chromatic than his London interior works. The Channel light of Dieppe — cool, bright, shifting — required a different chromatic approach than the murky artificial light of his Camden Town interiors. Paint is applied with directional, broken strokes that register the movement of light across the facades.