Last year Piano Nobile put on a selling exhibition of work by Walter Sickert (1860–1942) titled ‘Love, Death and Ennui’, comprising items from the collection of Herbert and Ann Lucas, who avidly collected paintings, drawings and prints by the artist. A version of that show can now be seen at Charleston in Lewes. Although the etchings, engravings and lithographs on view from across Sickert’s career are remarkable, the centrepiece of the exhibition is the artist’s oil painting Ennui (1913). Five versions of the work exist, owned by institutions including the Tate, the Ashmolean and the Royal Collection Trust (it’s one of King Charles III’s favourite works); it depicts a publican sitting, smoking and staring into the distance while his wife leans on a chest of drawers, her head out of view. It captures ‘the accumulated weariness of innumerable days’, to quote another of the painting’s illustrious admirers, Virginia Woolf.
Find out more from Charleston’s website.
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