Painted 1927-28

Echoing Sickert's famous early Venetian paintings, this major late work takes its title from an Italian term of affection, an appropriate choice for this tender painting of a mother and child. While literally referring to internal organs, in Italian, "viscere mie" is used as a deeply affectionate and intimate term, often conveying profound love, tenderness, and a sense of having someone deeply rooted within one's being. It expresses a love so strong that the person feels like an essential part of their very core. Sickert's tender depiction of a mother holding a child, aligns with the profound and intimate affection conveyed by the phrase.

The leading expert on Sickert, Wendy Baron, writes of this painting: "The background to this mother and child group is Il Cannaregio in Venice, a quarter of the city which Sickert was to recall when away from Venice more often than any other. He perhaps worked from early drawings as well as from photographs. The mother and baby were painted from a photograph which [the owner] told me he remembered having seen. The choice of a Venetian back-drop to set off the bold silhouette of the figure group harks back to earlier works such as the portraits of Israel Zangwill and Mrs Swinton." (W. Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, p. 521).

Viscere Mie can be compared to works in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Art and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The Tate Gallery cataloguing for their portrait of the actress, Peggy Ashcroft, citing Wendy Baron, compares their painting to Viscere Mie: "The appearance of the painting, [Variation on Peggy 1934-5] with the half-length figure silhouetted against a Venetian backdrop, is reminiscent of portraits from earlier in Sickert’s career such as Israel Zangwill c.1897–8 (Scottish National Gallery of Art) and Mrs Swinton. The Lady in the Gondola 1905 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Venice was one of a number of favoured locations from which Sickert repeatedly drew inspiration. He himself had visited the city several times... Wendy Baron has also pointed out that a precedent for the use of textured green monochrome is found within the mother and child grouping in another Venetian painting of 1927–8, Viscere Mie."

The late paintings of Sickert were the subject of a revelatory Arts Council exhibition, Late Sickert (Arts Council 1981-82). The catalogue contained a foreword in which Frank AUerbach argued that these later paintings may well be Sickert's greatest works. Helen Lessore, the owner of the celebrated 1950s and 1960s gallery, the Beaux Arts Gallery was another major champion, even judging the works of the young artists that she showed such as Frank Auerbach, Sheila Fell and Leon Kossoff by hanging it alongside late Sickert.

Walter Sickert taught David Bomberg, whose late works are simiairly heavily worked, and Bomberg in turn taught Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff who took the materially of paint even further.