Editing Walter Sickert (section)

==Late period==
After the death of his second wife in 1920, Sickert relocated to [[Dieppe]], where he painted scenes of casinos and café life until his return to London in 1922. In 1924, he was elected an Associate of the [[Royal Academy]] (ARA).

In 1926 he suffered an illness, thought to have been a minor stroke.<ref>Sickert et al. 1981, p. 29.</ref> In 1927, he abandoned his first name in favour of his middle name, and thereafter chose to be known as Richard Sickert.<ref>Baron et al. 1992, p. 283.</ref> His style and subject matter also changed: Sickert stopped drawing, and instead painted from snapshots usually taken by his third wife, [[Thérèse Lessore]], or from news photographs. The photographs were squared up for enlargement and transferred to canvas, with their pencil grids plainly visible in the finished paintings.

Seen by many of his contemporaries as evidence of the artist's decline, Sickert's late works are also his most forward-looking, and prefigure the practices of [[Chuck Close]] and [[Gerhard Richter]].<ref>Schwartz, Sanford. "The Master of the Blur", ''The New York Review of Books'', 11 April 2002, p. 16.</ref> Other paintings from Sickert's late period were adapted from illustrations by Victorian artists such as Georgie Bowers and [[John Gilbert (painter)|John Gilbert]]. Sickert, separating these illustrations from their original context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligibility partly dissolved, called the resulting works his "English Echoes".<ref>Sickert et al. 1981, pp. 102–103.</ref>

Sickert painted an informal portrait of [[Winston Churchill]] in about 1927.<ref>Sickert et al. 1981, p. 93.</ref> Churchill's wife [[Clementine Churchill|Clementine]] introduced him to Sickert, who had been a friend of her family. The two men got along so well that Churchill, whose hobby was painting, wrote to his wife that "He is really giving me a new lease of life as a painter."<ref>Soames 1999, pp. 308–309.</ref>

Sickert tutored and mentored students of the [[East London Group]], and exhibited alongside them at [[Lefevre Gallery|The Lefevre Gallery]] in November 1929.

Sickert made his last etching in 1929.<ref>Shone and Curtis 1988, p. 9.</ref>[[File:1 Highbury Place, former studio and school of Walter Sickert.jpg|thumb|Sickert's former studio and school at 1 Highbury Place, Islington, London]]Sickert was President of the [[Royal Society of British Artists]] from 1928 to 1930.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Lester |first1=Anthony J |title=Illustrious Past Members of the RBA |url=https://royalsocietyofbritishartists.org.uk/members/past-members/ |website=[[Royal Society of British Artists]] |access-date=15 June 2020 |archive-date=15 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200615050143/https://royalsocietyofbritishartists.org.uk/members/past-members/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> He became a Royal Academician (RA) in March 1934 but resigned from the Academy on 9 May 1935 in protest against the president's refusal to support the preservation of [[Jacob Epstein]]'s sculptural reliefs on the [[British Medical Association]] building in the Strand.<ref name="Baron 1980">Baron 1980.</ref> In the last decade of his life, he depended increasingly on assistants, especially his wife, for the execution of his paintings.<ref>Sickert et al. 1981, pp. 97–98.</ref>

One of Sickert's closest friends and supporters was newspaper baron [[Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook|Lord Beaverbrook]], who accumulated the largest single collection of Sickert paintings in the world. This collection, with a private correspondence between Sickert and Beaverbook, is in the [[Beaverbrook Art Gallery]] in [[Fredericton]], [[New Brunswick]], Canada. In addition to having painted Beaverbrook, Sickert painted portraits of notables including [[Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies]], [[Hugh Walpole]], [[Valentine Browne, 6th Earl of Kenmare]], and less formal depictions of [[Aubrey Beardsley]], [[King George V]], and [[Peggy Ashcroft]].