At the close of the 19th century, Britain went wild for music halls. In 1888, Parliament recorded 473 in London alone. Comic ditties were their bread and butter, though clog-dancers, flying children and strong-jawed ladies were equally likely fare.

Initially the preserve of the working classes (a ticket cost about the same as a supper of potatoes and dripping), music halls quickly attracted the attention of the bohemian set, among them the artist Walter Sickert, who went “nightly”, he admitted, and once sent a telegram home from the stalls informing his wife and their guests that he would not, after all, be back for dinner.

For Sickert, music halls were irresistible: a rich, strange, gaslit world in which reality and dream tangled. He took little lined laundry books and postcards in his pockets to sketch the goings-on, annotated with lines from the songs. Back in his studio, he turned them into wonderfully expressive, vibrant paintings that, despite drawing venom from the fusty corners of the Victorian art world, launched his career. They tend to be forgotten, muscled out by his Camden Town interiors (and rumours that he was Jack the Ripper, since disproved), but a new exhibition at Tate Britain this month – the biggest Sickert retrospective in 30 years – will return 26 of them to centre stage. Seen in chorus, they render beautifully what Sickert called “the solid basis of beef and beer… the whiff of leather and stout from the swing-doors” that made London “spiffing”.

You don’t have to look far into Sickert’s life to see that the stage, and music, were in his blood. Not only had his grandmother danced on stage and run a dancing school at the Princess Theatre on Oxford Street, but his parents – the Danish artist Oswald Sickert, and Eleanor Louisa, or “Nelly”, the illegitimate daughter of the British astronomer Richard Sheepshanks – were both talented singers, fond of Schubert lieder.

Sickert, who was born in Munich in 1860, recalled a childhood in which the subject of Shakespeare was never far from the table. After his parents settled in London, they took him to see Samuel Phelps, the greatest actor of the day, playing Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock. Sickert recited the plays in the garden, trying to imitate Phelps. He also liked to loiter at the windows of Entr’acte magazine, which reviewed the nascent music hall scene. At home, his parents threw dances, for which they took up the carpets, hung the mantels with moss and flowers and the gardens with Chinese lanterns, with Oswald at the piano.