Provenance: Christine Sickert (Mrs Walter Sickert); thence by descent; Christie’s, 12 November 1982, lot 46

Literature: Wendy Baron, Sickert Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, no.520, p.464 (illustrated)

Wendy Baron (op cit) cites the present picture as one of a small of group landscape scenes Sickert painted near Dieppe “with planar compositions and low horizons characteristic of the Hague School of landscape painters”. This painting with its palette of subdued colours conveying the subject primarily through tone is not only typical of Hague painters (particularly Jacob Maris) but also slightly recalls the style of Sickert’s earlier mentor James Abbott McNeil Whistler. A similar treatment of landscape and sky is evident in the painting Dieppe Races of c.1920-26 now in Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (acc.1945).