Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was one of England's greatest impressionist painters. His cityscapes and music hall scenes were frequently based, compositionally, on Degas's paintings.

Walter Sickert was born in Munich to a Danish father, Oswald Sickert, a painter and journalistic draftsman, and an English mother. Oswald emigrated with his family to England in 1868 to keep his sons from being conscripted into the German army. In 1875 Walter enrolled at King's College in London. In 1881 he entered the Slade School in London, but he soon left to help James McNeill Whistler print his etchings. In 1883 Sickert, by then Whistler's apprentice, took a painting by Whistler to Paris, where he met Edgar Degas, whose devoted follower he became from then on. Sickert had come to feel that Whistler painted with too much surface facility.

In 1885 Sickert and his wife honeymooned in Dieppe. His scenes of Dieppe date from 1885, but especially after...