Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942) was born in Munich on 31 May 1860, the eldest son of the Danish-German artist Oswald Sickert. The family settled in England when he was eight. He first tried the stage, then entered the Slade School in 1881 and soon became a pupil and assistant of James McNeill Whistler.
In 1883 he travelled to Paris and met Edgar Degas, who changed his work. Following Degas’s advice, Sickert painted in the studio from drawings and memory rather than directly from nature. His first major subjects, from the late 1880s, were music halls: lamplit stages, gaslit faces, the audience as much as the performers. He joined the New English Art Club in 1888 and took studios in working-class districts of London, first at Cumberland Market and from 1905 in Camden Town.
There he painted bare rooms with cheap furniture and figures who seem to have run out of things to say, including the series known as The Camden Town Murder. In 1911 he founded the Camden Town Group of British painters. He spent his last years between London, Dieppe and Bath, and died at Bathampton, near Bath, on 22 January 1942, aged 81.