Walter Sickert painted himself in many roles … but not Jack the Ripper

A Tate retrospective portrays the English artist as a master of disguise, and in thrall to his early stage career

A major Tate Britain exhibition opening this month will be the first to display a rare early self-portrait of Walter Sickert, the influential English painter, that shows how his early career on the stage drove his ever-changing art.

The string of self-portraits includes a small pen and ink sketch from 1882, found in Islington's Local History Centre, in which the artist leans forward in a pose taken from his idol, the actor-manager Henry Irving. Sickert, born in 1860, had joined Irving's stage company in his youth as a performer, before leaving to study art at the Slade School in 1881.