Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was an artist of prodigious creativity. For sixty years, in his roles as painter, teacher, and polemicist, he was a source of inspiration and influence to successive generations of British painters. With his roots in the Victorian era, Sickert broke all taboos. He was uncompromisingly truthful, revealing beauty in the squalid as in the sublime: in cockney music halls, the crumbling streets of Dieppe, the grand sites of Venice, and the low-life of Camden Town. Decades before Warhol, he exploited the potential of photo-based imagery and of studio production lines to create iconic portraits of the grandees of theatrical, social, and political life. This catalogue is divided into two parts: essay chapters describe Sickert's chronology in terms of stylistic and technical development, and a fully illustrated catalogue presents more than 2800 drawings and paintings, many of which have never been published before.

A poignant account of international adoption and family describes a couple's experiences as they journey to the former Soviet Union and wade through a vast bureaucracy as they find their two new daughters, Natalie and Lana, reflecting on such issues as feelings of guilt over taking children away from their roots, the mystery of her daughters' earliest childhoods, and more. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.