Walter Sickert
Tate Britain, London

If your impression of Walter Sickert’s work is of dark and dingy nude paintings of prostitutes, the fascinating new exhibition at Tate Britain (until 18 September) will come as a surprise. They are there, certainly, but they only take up one room of eight.

The Post-Impressionist artist Sickert (1860-1942) was fascinated by social lowlife. Many of his paintings were of music halls, of prostitutes, of those living in poverty and squalor. The hard reality of his paintings sought to portray, in his own words, “the sensation of a page torn from the book of life”.

His music hall paintings often show both the working-class audience and the stage; polite society viewed female performers in music halls as little better than prostitutes.