Sickert, Walter

The Woolfs published Charles Mauron s The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature in 1927, translated by Fry, and Mauron clarified for Woolf how spatial volumes in art might parallel psychological volumes in literature. In Walter Sickert, her extended essay about the painter, Woolf touched on that theme and deplored boundaries between the arts nowadays we are all so specialized . She argued of her favourite writers that Dryden, Lamb, Hazlitt were acutely aware of the mixture of elements and wrote of literature with music and painting in their minds . In her novel The Waves Bernard s soliloquies are similarly structured by visual patterns. 

Woolf s image of the eye and the brain, which appears also in Walter Sickert, Three Guineas and elsewhere, matches Freud s model of the unconscious, that is, the representation of visual thinking as an archaic consciousness. 

Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert A Conversation (London Hogarth Press, 1934), p. 24. 

Refuses honorary degree from Manchester University (3 March). Travels to Italy, via France (5-27 May). Turns down invitation to give Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge (early September). Publishes Flush (5 October). Meets Walter Sickert (15 December). 

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