Reclining Nude – Le Lit de Cuivre

There are several versions of this painting in existence. Sickert had begun to draw nudes on metal bedsteads in Dieppe in 1902. On his return from Venice in 1904, he began to paint the subject. He continued to do so in London, often working from drawings made in France.

In many of his post-Venetian paintings of the nude, Sickert broke away from a horizontal planar emphasis by placing the bed in a diagonal recession or even at right angles to the surface. This work shows how Sickert had begun to develop a broken, crusty touch in the paintwork.

In an article about the work shown in Sotheby’s London: An Artistic Crossroads exhibition in 2024, Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote:

‘Emphatically naked, she is certainly not a Nude: Sickert hated the academic and idealising associations of that word… Sickert became the great pioneer, in British art, of uncompromising urban realism. His pictures stand out from those by any of his contemporaries for their sheer harshness of vision, their committed embrace of the dingy facts of city life. His art is that of a melancholy voyeur, shot through with a subdued taste for melodrama and an extraordinary, sensual feel for the medium of paint: dark, brooding colour, thick encrustations of pigment. Le Lit de Cuivre is one of the unquestioned masterpieces of his Camden Town period, as well as a perfect demonstration of his belief that the real world is always and inevitably impure.’

You can buy a high-quality print of this work from Art UK.

Visual description: A nude female figure reclining on a bed with brass bedsteads. She is positioned on her side, with her legs slightly bent. Her face rests on a pillow and is partially obscured by shadow. She is lying on top of purple covers in a green room. The room is sparsely detailed, with a focus on the figure and the bed. The brushstrokes are loose.