WALTER SICKERT
A Life

Matthew Sturgis

For Rebecca

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1 A Well-Bred Artist

I The Münchener Kind’l’

II A New Home

III L’enfant Terrible

2 Apprentice or Student?

I The Utility Player

II Whistler’s Studio

III Relative Values

3 Impressions and Opinions

I The Butterfly Propaganda

II A New English Artist

III The London Impressionists

IV Unfashionable Portraiture

V In Black and White

4 The End of the Act

I Gathering Clouds

II Bridge of Sighs

III The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

IV Amantium Irae

5 Jack Abroad

I A Watering Place Out of Season

II Changing Effects

III Gaîté Montparnasse

IV Dal Vero

6 Londra Benedetta

I The Lady in Red

II Ambrosial Nights

III Mr Sickert at Home

IV The Artist as Teacher

7 Contre Jour

I Les Affaires de Camden Town

II An Imperfect Modern

III Red, White, and Blue

IV Suspense

8 The New Age

I The Conduct of a Talent

II Private View

III How Old Do I Look?

9 Lazarus Raised

I Over the Footlights

II Home Life

III Bathampton

IV Cheerio

Postscript Walter Sickert: Case Closed

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements and Preface

Notes

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE A Well-Bred Artist

I THE MÜNCHENER KIND’L’

He is a dear little fellow.

(Eleanor Sickert to Oswald Adalbert Sickert)

Walter Richard Sickert was born on 31 May 1860 in a first-floor flat at 59 Augustenstrasse, Munich, in what was then the independent kingdom of Bavaria.¹ He was the first-born child of Oswald Adalbert Sickert and his wife Eleanor. Oswald Sickert was a Dane, from the town of Altona in the Duchy of Holstein. He was a trained artist, with ambitions as a painter, but he was constrained to work as a hack draughtsman-on-wood for a Bavarian illustrated comic-paper called the Fliegende Blätter. Eleanor – or Nelly as she was known by her affectionate husband and her friends and relatives – was English by birth. The couple spoke mainly English at home.² Their new son was christened by the English chaplain at Munich: he was given the names Walter Richard.³ Walter was chosen as being a name that looked – even if it did not sound – the same in both English and German.⁴ Richard was the name of the boy’s maternal grandfather, the late Revd Richard Sheepshanks, a figure whose presence loomed over the young family, half beneficent, half reproachful.

Richard Sheepshanks had not been a conventional clergyman. He had scarcely been a clergyman at all. He never held any cure. His interest in the celestial sphere, though keen, had been scientific. He made his reputation as an astronomer and mathematician. The Sheepshanks came of prosperous Yorkshire stock. The family in the generation before had made a fortune in cloth, supplying – so it was said – material for military greatcoats to the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. The money from the Leeds factories amassed in this profitable trade allowed Richard and his five siblings to indulge their interests and enthusiasms. One brother, Thomas, chose Brighton and dissipation.⁵ Another, John, dedicated himself to art: he moved to London and built up a large and important collection of English paintings, which he exhibited to the public at his house in Rutland Gate and bequeathed to the nation in 1857, six years before his death.*⁶

Richard turned to the sciences. A brilliant university career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was crowned with a mathematics fellowship in 1817. He briefly contemplated the prospect of both the law and the Church and secured the necessary qualifications for both. (Having taken holy orders, he always styled himself ‘the Reverend’.) On receiving his inheritance, however, he was able to direct all his considerable energies to scientific research. He became a member of the Geological and Astronomical Societies, and was for several years the editor of the latter’s Monthly Notes. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the University of London. His interests were many, ranging from demographics to the study of weights and measures. He had a particular passion for fine scientific instruments and devoted most of his income to buying them. He also busied himself in the intellectual and political disputes of the scientific world.⁷

In scientific circles Richard Sheepshanks was greatly respected – much loved by his friends and not a little feared by his enemies. He was, in the restrained words of his close colleague, the astronomer Augustus de Morgan, a man of ‘very decided opinions’. And he was not shy of expressing them. His first professional training had been as a lawyer, and throughout his academic career he had a relish for controversies. He was, as he himself put it, well suited to such business, having ‘leisure, courage and contempt for opinion when he knew he was right’. He was well armed with a ready, if somewhat sarcastic, wit and a piquant turn of phrase. But in matters of what he considered to be of real importance he would – according to one obituarist – drop these weapons in favour of a more ‘earnest deportment’ and a more ‘temperate’ utterance. Despite being of ‘hardly middle stature’, having red-tinged hair and the inevitable side-whiskers of mid-Victorian fashion, he was, from the evidence of his portraits, a handsome man. He was also excellent company – clever, witty, well read in both the classics and in modern literature, and widely travelled in Europe.⁸ He was knowledgeable too about art; and, tipped off by his brother John, commissioned Thomas Lawrence to paint a portrait of his beloved elder sister, Anne.⁹

Anne Sheepshanks was as remarkable as her brother. A woman of enormous practical capability, intelligence, and sound sense, she encouraged and supported Richard in all his endeavours. She allied her resources to his, sharing his interests, his cares, and his house. The home they established together at 30 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury – not far from the British Museum – became a lively gathering place for many of the intellectual luminaries of scientific London. They even built their own small observatory in the garden, from which, in an age before saturated street-lighting, they were able to mark the passage of the stars.¹⁰

The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks – like his sister – never married. His fellowship at Cambridge was dependent upon his remaining a bachelor, and he seems to have been in no hurry to give up his position, his salary, or his independence. Nevertheless, he did not allow professional considerations to stand altogether between him and the opposite sex.

It is not known exactly how or when he encountered Eleanor Henry. Indeed, very little is known about Eleanor Henry at all, except that she was Irish, fair-haired and handsome, and was a dancer on the London stage.¹¹ Perhaps Mr Sheepshanks picked her out of a chorus line. Or perhaps he met her in the street. At the beginning of the 1830s she was living in Henrietta Street, a little cul-de-sac behind Brunswick Square, near to the Sheepshanks’ London home.* The popular reputation of dancers in the nineteenth century set them very low in the moral order; they were ranked beneath even actresses, and set almost on a par with prostitutes. This picture, however, was certainly a distortion. Although ‘respectability’ was a rather fluid concept during the early Victorian age, most ballet girls actually came from modestly ‘respectable’ homes, and lived – as far as can be ascertained – modestly ‘respectable’ lives.¹² Eleanor Henry’s position seems to confirm this point. For a start she was married. Her husband was a Mr James Henry. He listed his profession as ‘Solicitor’, although he does not appear in the law lists of the period and may well have been little more than a lawyer’s clerk.¹³ At the beginning of the 1830s they were living together in the house of a Mrs Henry (perhaps James’s mother).¹⁴ Despite this unpropitious domestic arrangement, the Revd Richard Sheepshanks succeeded not only in forming an attachment with Eleanor but also in fathering a child on her. A daughter was born on 19 August 1830.¹⁵

Mr Henry’s attitude to, or indeed knowledge of, his wife’s liaison is unknown. He did, however, give his surname and his blessing to the infant. It was he, rather than Richard Sheepshanks, who attended the christening at St Pancras Parish Church and who had himself listed as the child’s legal father. The little girl was baptized Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry. The last Christian name is something of a mystery, as the Henrys did not, as far as records show, belong to the Moravian sect.¹⁶

The young Eleanor Louisa – or Nelly – was brought up in the Henry household. If Richard Sheepshanks provided some assistance he did so covertly. Nevertheless, his interest in his natural daughter does seem to have been real and, given the proximity of Woburn Place to Henrietta Street, he must have had opportunities for observing her. Almost nothing is known of Nelly Henry’s childhood, except that it was not happy. The demands of her mother’s stage work meant that she was often neglected. She did, however, show an early love for music. Her mother sang to her, and the songs of the passing street performers also caught her ear, making a lasting impression on her memory and her imagination.¹⁷

The Henrys moved from Henrietta Street in 1833. They disappear from view but almost certainly remained in London, for, at some moment later in the decade, Eleanor broke with her husband and began a relationship with Samuel Buchanan Green, a dancing master from Highgate. She took her daughter with her and, though there is no evidence to suggest that she married Mr Green, she took his name and the young Nelly came to regard Mr Green as her ‘step-father’.¹⁸ In November 1838, when Eleanor gave birth to a son, christened Alfred, she listed her name on the birth certificate as ‘Green, late Henry’.¹⁹ In 1840, the Greens established a dancing school in connection with the Princess Theatre in Oxford Street. The teaching studio was immediately behind the theatre at 36 Castle Street and the family lived above it – an arrangement that can only have increased the 10-year-old Nelly’s love of music.²⁰

Perhaps the Revd Richard Sheepshanks disapproved of these new domestic conditions, or maybe the arrival of young Alfred placed a strain on the resources of the Green household; perhaps the Sheepshanks’ own plans to move out of London precipitated the change. Whatever the reason, at about this time Richard offered to take his natural daughter under his own care, to remove her from the stage-door world of Castle Street, to arrange for her schooling, and to provide in some as yet unspecified measure for her future. The offer was accepted and, at the beginning of the 1840s, the old loosely fixed order was broken up.²¹

Nelly was sent over the Channel to a small boarding school at Neuville-lès-Dieppe. Richard Sheepshanks and his sister closed up Woburn Place and moved to a house on the outskirts of Reading, where once again they built a little observatory in the garden. The Greens continued with their school at Castle Street. And according to family tradition Mrs ‘Green, late Henry’ also performed on the stage of the Princess Theatre.²² It is doubtful that she ever saw her daughter again. She might have encountered Richard Sheepshanks occasionally. He returned often to London during the first years of the new decade. He was engaged in the great work of his later life: the establishment of a new set of standard weights and measures, the former one having been destroyed in the fire that swept through the Palace of Westminster in 1832. In a well-insulated subterranean laboratory in the cellars of Somerset House, he carried out tens of thousands of micro-measurements in order to determine the standard yard.²³ It was a staggering exercise of both patience and artistry. He had, it was recognized, ‘an extraordinarily skilful eye with the micrometer’ and his comparisons ‘were so far superior to those of all preceding experimenters … as to defy all competition on grounds of accuracy’.²⁴

In 1850, Eleanor and Samuel Green vanish from the London Directories. According to the family tradition preserved by Nelly, they emigrated to Australia, where Mrs Green took to drink.²⁵ It has been supposed that Richard Sheepshanks arranged, if he did not insist upon, this removal, but there is no evidence to support such a theory. Nevertheless, the notion of a close relative disappearing to the Antipodes never to be heard of again was powerful in its suggestion. It became one of the defining elements in young Nelly Henry’s personal story. And it was a story that in time she would communicate to her own children, thrilling them with its mingled sense of mystery and loss. The actual moment of Eleanor Green’s departure from England, however, probably passed unknown across the Channel by her daughter.²⁶

Dieppe in the 1840s already had an established expatriate colony. Living was cheap there compared to England. The completion of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the introduction of steam packet-boats meant that it took a mere eleven hours to travel from London to the French port. Mrs Maria Slee’s school, set – across the harbour from the old town – on the still verdant slopes of Neuville, was one of several educational establishments in the area catering for English children:²⁷ the bracing sea air was considered to be beneficial to youth.²⁸ Mrs Slee’s was a happy place, and it offered Nelly the structure and companionship that had been lacking from the lonely and bohemian years of her childhood, and also the security of real affection.

She boarded there not only during the terms but also in the holidays, growing in time to be less a pupil than a part of the family. Mrs Slee was almost a second mother to Nelly; her daughters ‘became much attached’ to their young English charge, and she to them.²⁹ It was during these years that Dieppe developed, for Nelly, into a charmed place – the place where ‘she was happy and well for the first time’.³⁰

She stayed at the school until she was almost eighteen, becoming strong, handsome and accomplished. She learnt to speak French ‘with a good accent at least’.³¹ Her status and her future prospects, however, remained a mystery to her. She was aware that she was under the protection of a distinguished guardian – a Fellow of the Royal Society – but, although they corresponded, it seems that they did not meet. She did not learn the identity of her protector until 1848, when she was eighteen.³² Richard Sheepshanks was impressed with the progress made by his daughter, and he was anxious that it should continue. But perhaps not at Dieppe. The year 1848 was one of turmoil and revolution throughout Europe. The French once again overthrew their monarch, the unfortunate Louis Philippe. He fled to England and many English residents in France made the same trip. Anti-British sentiment was rife. Richard took the precaution of arranging for Nelly to leave Dieppe to finish her education in the pretty little Baltic town of Altona near the mouth of the river Elbe. Altona was nominally a Danish town, part of the Danish-controlled duchy of Holstein. But it was just across the river from Hamburg and had strong links with the German states.

Richard Sheepshanks knew the town well because it had a famous observatory, renowned for producing the clearest and most accurate astronomical tables. For many years it had been under the directorship of his close friend, Heinrich Schumacher. Schumacher was an astronomer of international standing, a member of the Royal Society in London, and the editor of Astronomische Nachrichten, the principal journal in the field.³³ And it was with Professor Schumacher and his family that Nelly was sent to stay. The events of 1848 had not been without their effect on the Schumachers. Hostilities had also erupted between Denmark and Prussia over the disputed territory of Holstein, and while the conflict continued the professor’s salary was not paid. Richard Sheepshanks was happy to think that Nelly’s board-and-lodging expenses would contribute to the family coffers. The professor undertook to see to her education, while his wife, his daughter, and the widow of his son, promised to make her welcome.³⁴

Initially, Nelly’s position in the household was slightly ambiguous. Richard had intimated to Professor Schumacher that, although Nelly was his ‘ward’, she would ‘not improbably’ have to make her own way in the world – perhaps as a governess, that established refuge for portionless but educated Victorian girls.³⁵ Certainly Richard Sheepshanks’ hopes for his ward’s education suggested such a path. He wanted her to study music and drawing, as well as learning German and mathematics and perhaps even some Latin. But he repeatedly stressed that ‘Nelly’ was to be shown no special consideration,³⁶ and that if she could be made use of ‘as nurse, amanuensis, housemaid, or [in] any other capacity’ it would be ‘the best education she could have’.³⁷

Such promptings were unnecessary. Nelly had a generous and helpful disposition. She speedily endeared herself to the Schumachers through her acts of kindness and her expressions of gratitude. She also proved a ready pupil. She learnt, as she put it, ‘to sing very well and to paint very badly. She devoted herself to embroidery and fine sewing. She revealed a gift for languages, learning to speak German ‘like a native’.³⁸ She also picked up Italian and Danish, though it is not known whether Professor Schumacher found time to teach her any Latin. (He had replied facetiously to Richard Sheepshanks’ suggestion that he might give Nelly some classical education with the French verse: ‘Soleil qui luit le matin,/Enfant qui boit du vin,/Femme qui sait le Latin/Ne viennent jamais a bonne fin.’*³⁹)

The Revd Richard Sheepshanks corresponded regularly with both Nelly and Professor Schumacher and was encouraged by news of her progress. He was able to confirm this good impression when he visited Altona in October 1849. Over the previous year his plans for his ward’s future seem to have grown and developed. And it was perhaps during, or immediately after, this visit that he revealed to Nelly his true position and declared his intention of formally recognizing her as his child. She preserved always, as the one scrap of writing in his hand, a passage from the letter in which he revealed to her his fatherhood: ‘Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you.’⁴⁰ The scrap is undated, but there is a detectable shift in Richard’s attitude to Nelly after that October; references to her are more open and more openly affectionate; and his letters end with expressions of ‘best love’.⁴¹

If Nelly’s knowledge of modern languages grew chez Schumacher so did her sense of fun and her sense of life’s possibilities. It was a convivial household in a convivial town, and she was surrounded by people of her own age. Altona had a sizeable English population and Nelly formed several long-lasting friendships. There were frequent picnics, concerts, operas, even balls. She made excursions into Italy and Austria.⁴² This round of diversion was interrupted at the end of 1850 by Professor Schumacher’s sudden illness and scarcely less sudden death.⁴³ Nelly, however, had become part of the family by this stage. There was no suggestion that she should leave. She stayed on in the Schumacher household, a companion to the grieving family.

Perhaps it was this family tragedy that introduced her to Professor Schumacher’s son, Johannes.⁴⁴ He was the artistic member of the family and had been away, studying painting in Rome. He immediately established a rapport with the family’s English houseguest, a rapport that deepened the following summer when Nelly nursed him through a bout of illness. She shared his love of Nature, and his enjoyment of climbing mountains. He admired her singing.⁴⁵ In tandem with his friendship for Nelly, Johannes also developed a close tie with her guardian. Missing his own father, he took to writing to Richard Sheepshanks, seeking his advice, his encouragement and assistance. He even visited him in London in the autumn of 1852. Early in the following year, Johannes wrote from Italy declaring that he planned to leave Rome to continue his studies in Paris. For a painter, he declared, Paris was the place to learn.⁴⁶

It was the common cry across the art schools of Europe at the time. Italy might boast the treasures of antiquity and the Renaissance, and the great German academies at Munich, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Dresden could offer a thorough practical training; but the French capital had the glamour of innovation and even revolt. It was there that the new spirit of ‘Realism’ was asserting itself with most force: at the Salon of 1850, Gustave Courbet had struck a new note with his monumental canvas The Stonebreakers. The depiction of the contemporary working man on the heroic scale of antiquity caused a sensation that others were keen to experience and to echo. Students gravitated to Paris from all over Europe and America, to throng the ateliers of Troyan, Gleyre, Couture, and Lecoq de Boisbaudran, hangar-like studios bristling with easels, plaster-casts and ambitions. Johannes Schumacher was not the only son of Altona to be drawn to Paris. He found several others already there. Amongst his confrères was an earnest young art student called Oswald Adalbert Sickert.

Oswald Sickert belonged to Altona’s artistic elite. His father, the dashing fair-haired, blond-bearded Johann Jürgen Sickert, was a pillar of the cultural community: an artist, wit, and dandy who – despite his Nordic colouring – was known to at least some of his friends by the Italianate nickname, ‘Sickarto’.⁴⁷ The son of a long line of Flensborg fishermen, he had trained as a ‘decorative painter’ and was – at least according to his grandson – for a while the ‘head of a firm of decorators who were employed in the royal palaces of Christian VIII of Denmark’.⁴⁸ He became, in time, an accomplished landscape painter, and after moving to Altona in the late 1820s was a leading member of the town’s exhibiting society. He showed there regularly, and also at the neighbouring Hamburg Kunstverein.⁴⁹ He was interested in technical innovations and was a pioneer of both lithography and photography. In 1850 the local directories list his address – at 34 Blücherstrasse – as a ‘studio of Daguerreotype’.*⁵⁰

Nevertheless, he did not abandon his first calling. He continued to undertake decorative commissions: the museum in the town still contains a painted ‘overdoor’ by him of a woman with flowers. In 1855 – at the request of the municipality – he drew up a scheme for providing art training for the town’s artisans through ‘Sunday Continuation classes’. In it he emphasized the practical benefits and applications of art, insisting on a thorough grounding in geometry and perspective. He considered that it would be ‘of more use to a carpenter, a turner or a smith, if his lessons enable him to draw a vase or an ornament correctly, than if his schooling results in nothing more than the adornment of his bedroom with a few trophies’.⁵¹ But if Johann Jürgen thought that art could be useful he also believed that the artist’s life should be fun. He was a great promoter of artistic conviviality – a composer of drinking songs and comic verses, and a leading light in the Altona dining society known as the ‘Namenlosen’ or the ‘Unnamed’, all the members of which were designated only by numbers.⁵²

Having been widowed in 1838 (when Oswald was only ten), Johann Jürgen seems to have done everything to encourage his only child’s artistic career. The young Oswald Adalbert showed precocious ability. In 1844, at the age of sixteen, he won a travelling scholarship to Copenhagen to study at the art academy. Once there, he revealed an independent spirit, abandoning the school’s classes after his first term and taking private tuition in ‘perspective drawing’ from the foremost Danish painter of the day, C. W. Eckersberg. He then devoted himself to working in the cast gallery for the whole of the following year. In 1846 he abandoned Denmark for the altogether more prestigious Academy at Munich.⁵³

Oswald Sickert stayed in the Bavarian capital for the next six years, submitting himself to the rigours of the Germanic training system. He was supported by his father, who visited him on at least one occasion and encouraged him with regular letters. Each epistle ended, ‘somewhat … to his son’s irritation’, with the imprecation – the distilled essence of old Johann Jürgen Sickert’s artistic wisdom – ‘male gut und schnell’ (paint well – paint quickly).⁵⁴ But Munich for all its virtues and opportunities had one great limitation: it was not Paris. The main drama, it was felt, was happening elsewhere. The students of Munich were alive to the new currents in French art; and in 1851 they even got a chance to view some of Courbet’s work at first hand when he exhibited in Munich, and perhaps even visited the city.⁵⁵ Oswald Sickert and his companions soon came to idolize this new master.⁵⁶ And the impact of his work prompted many of them to move to the French capital. In 1852 Oswald Sickert joined the exodus, enrolling at the Parisian teaching-studio of Thomas Couture.⁵⁷

Couture was, and remains, famous for his depictions of Classical Rome. His monumental canvas, Romans of the Decadence, was the cynosure of the 1847 Salon and was bought by the Louvre. But despite his antique themes, he allied himself closely to the contemporary strains of artistic Realism. His depiction of the dissolute Romans had been intended – and taken – as a comment on the corruption of France under Louis Philippe’s rule. He retained a reputation as a radical and independent spirit and his studio was regarded as one of the most exciting in Paris. It attracted students from all over Europe, and from America too. They found Couture’s regime both liberating and challenging. His manner had a bracing informality, very different from that of other teachers. He startled more than one student with such direct criticisms as, ‘That’s horrid! If you can’t do better than that you had better stop!’⁵⁸

Although he worked within the framework of tradition – the ‘good tradition’ of la bonne peinture that Sickert later described as being ‘sedulously nursed’ in that Paris of the 1850s – Couture was always open to the possibilities of new techniques and procedures.⁵⁹ To young artists like Oswald Sickert who arrived from the rigorously exacting art academies of Germany, such an approach was electrifying. One young artist who came to Paris from Düsseldorf considered Couture’s teaching ‘a sublime reaction from the dry-as-dust German painting then in vogue’.⁶⁰ Another thanked Couture for freeing him from ‘the niggling technique of the Germans’ as well as opening up his compositions to a much ‘broader vision & conception’.⁶¹ It was Paris that liberated Oswald Sickert. And although he was there a relatively short time (barely a year) it was, for him, a defining artistic experience: he came to regard himself as ‘more an antique Parisian than a Dane’ – or, indeed, a Bavarian.⁶²

But of course, as in most educational establishments, it was the other students – and the place itself – that provided the real education. Oswald Sickert found himself in an exciting milieu. In Paris he had the chance to see more of Courbet’s pictures.⁶³ He travelled in France, and discovered Dieppe as a sketching ground.⁶⁴ He mixed with art students not only from Couture’s atelier but from the other studios as well. There was a strong Munich contingent, including Wilhelm Füssli, Moritz Delft and Cesar Willich, as well as others from Altona, including – from 1853 – Johannes Schumacher.⁶⁵

It was Schumacher who, on one of their return visits to Altona, introduced the 24-year-old Oswald Sickert to the family houseguest, Eleanor Henry.⁶⁶ The Eleanor he met was an accomplished young woman of twenty-two, vivacious, attractive, and with beautiful fair hair. Oswald Sickert, for his part, was touched with the metropolitan glamour of Paris. He had a fine beard and, despite a retiring manner, seems to have been considered rather a dashing figure by the young ladies of Altona. (Preserved amongst his papers is one letter from an admirer – not Eleanor Henry – who addressed him with more poetic ardour than geo-political exactness as ‘Dear German Lord Byron’.⁶⁷) It was not, however, his romantic looks, nor even his fledgling artistic reputation, that seems to have drawn Eleanor Henry to him. It was music. They shared a common passion. Oswald Sickert played the piano with real sensitivity and skill. According to one exacting critic, his ‘technique was faulty, but his phrasing was musicianly, and … for passion and for singing quality in cantabile passages he excelled many public performers’. He had a strong sense of rhythm and was a ‘brilliant’ sight-reader.⁶⁸ Eleanor, the dancer’s daughter, had her own sense of rhythm and allied it to a beautiful singing voice. Their romance flourished to an accompaniment of Schubert lieder.

Even amongst the romantically inclined young people of Altona, however, it was recognized that Eleanor’s social position was problematic. Although the exact details of her background remained vague, it had become known that she was illegitimate. This, to the conventional mid nineteenth-century mind, was an all-but-ineradicable stain, a bar to any full social acceptance. But to the young Oswald Sickert, brought up in the world of art, schooled in the studios of Copenhagen, Munich, and Paris, such considerations counted for little besides the more real attractions of Eleanor’s character and person.⁶⁹ He was happy to overlook the supposed taint.*

Oswald was more concerned that Eleanor’s guardian might not favour the suit of an as yet unknown Danish artist for the hand of his ward. There were, however, encouraging signs. Johannes Schumacher – himself quite as unknown as Oswald Sickert – had fallen in love with another member of Altona’s international colony, an English girl called Annie Williams. He wanted to propose to her but had received no encouragement from Mr Williams, who insisted that Johannes first prove he was capable of supporting a wife. Johannes had sought Richard Sheepshanks’ advice on the matter and had been much heartened by his tone of encouragement. It was a tone backed up with practical assistance. Sheepshanks commissioned a picture from his young friend and sent him a cheque for £100.⁷⁰ This positive attitude towards the romance of one impecunious painter and an English girl with prospects must have given Oswald Sickert some small grounds for optimism.

That optimism was soon tested. In the summer of 1855, Richard Sheepshanks announced that he wished to take Eleanor on a tour of France and Italy. They would travel together with his sister Anne. Eleanor, however, was to meet her father at once in Paris. It was the news of her imminent departure from Altona that precipitated Oswald Sickert to declare his love. He proposed and was accepted. Eleanor was touched not only by the earnestness of his suit but by his willingness to overlook her doubtful status. Nevertheless, she must have had some doubts about how her father would take the news. The engagement was not disclosed. She travelled to France with it as a secret.⁷¹

The reunion with her father in Paris was a happy and exciting one. Plans for the trip were discussed and, while they waited for Anne to arrive, Richard took Eleanor around the shops to equip her with a new wardrobe. They bought dresses, and lace, and jewellery. In this congenial atmosphere of confidence and acceptance, Eleanor relaxed. She confided the secret of her engagement to her father. The effect was devastating. He ordered her to break the attachment. When she declined, he became furious. Eleanor was reduced to tears but refused to yield. Richard, behaving in the manner traditional to irate parents, cancelled the proposed European holiday. He refused to allow Eleanor to return to Altona but sent her back instead to lodge with Mrs Slee at Dieppe. Although at twenty-four she would have been more a staff member than a pupil, the ignominy of her abrupt return, the exchange of the gay whirl of Altona for the institutionalized tedium of a Dieppoise boarding school (even one as sympathetic as Mrs Slee’s), and the separation both from her beloved fiance and her new-found father, must have been painful.⁷²

The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks, ignoring any counsels of clemency, went back to England. By post he continued to rain down further reproaches upon Eleanor, until – on 29 July – he was struck down by a sudden paralysis. After lying for a week unable to talk or move, he died at his house in Reading. He was just sixty. Eleanor blamed herself. Away in Dieppe, she was convinced that it was her untimely announcement of her engagement that had precipitated the stroke. Medical opinion took a different view, while Richard’s friends were convinced that he had overstrained his constitution with his work on the Standard Yard. But such notions, if they reached Neuville, did little to console the distressed Nelly.⁷³

Richard Sheepshanks had, at the time he first revealed his parentage, planned to alter his will in order to make provision for Eleanor. But he died before he did so. His sister Anne was his sole legatee. She had managed his affairs and shared his interests throughout his life, and she now readily took up the burden of his responsibilities. Eleanor became her charge. Miss Sheepshanks, unlike her brother, was not implacably opposed to Oswald Sickert’s suit – although she perhaps felt that it should be tested by the trials of time and distance. At any event, she arranged for Eleanor, after she had recovered from the shock of the moment, to go as a parlour-boarder to a ‘first-class’ school in Paris; and by 1857 she had found her a post as resident governess to the two daughters of George Harris, a Harrow schoolmaster, with a salary of £100 a year.⁷⁴

Oswald Sickert, meanwhile, did not lose heart. He kept in touch with Eleanor and he persevered with his painting. There were modest successes. His scenes of contemporary agricultural life seem to have combined a fashionable ‘Realismus’ with a traditional German taste for landscape.⁷⁵ He had a picture accepted by the Berlin Academy in 1856, and the following year he showed at the Kiel Kunsthalle, where the ‘fluent tone’ and ‘mood’ of his work was praised.⁷⁶ Also in 1857 he exhibited a picture at the British Institute in London, and it is probable that he came over to see it, and Eleanor.⁷⁷ He was dividing his time between Altona and Munich.⁷⁸ He worked hard and his career advanced – but at a frustratingly slow pace. The market was crowded and sales were hard to get.

Eventually, he was obliged to compromise. In a bid to prove his ability to support a wife he returned to Munich and took a job on the Fliegende Blätter, a periodical noted for its comic illustrations. Many of Germany’s leading draughtsmen contributed to the weekly’s pages, but there was also much unsigned hackwork, and this is what Oswald Sickert was hired to provide.⁷⁹ It is not likely that the work was very remunerative, but it does seem to have convinced Anne Sheepshanks of the suitor’s earnestness and capability. The marriage was allowed to go forward.

Oswald Sickert travelled from Munich to claim his bride. During the years of trial his ardour had remained undimmed. As Eleanor confided happily to one of her friends, he loved her ‘with all the strength of a reserved nature concentrated to love one object’.⁸⁰ The wedding took place in the parish church at Harrow on 3 August 1859. Eleanor was resplendent in a gown of white striped silk. She had no fewer than five bridesmaids, including her two young pupils. Mr Harris gave her away,⁸¹ and Mrs Slee came over from Dieppe for the occasion.⁸² Although there is no record of Anne Sheepshanks’ attendance at the ceremony, she certainly gave her blessing to it. She also gave Eleanor an allowance with which to start out on married life.⁸³

The honeymoon took the newly-weds through Belgium to Düsseldorf, on to the picturesque lake at Königswasser, and thence to Munich. There the young couple installed themselves in a small flat at 16 Schwantalestrasse. Eleanor brought with her little more than her beautiful wedding dress, her ‘Paris trousseau’, and a desire to make a happy home.⁸⁴ They had little furniture beyond a bed and a piano; but that was probably all that they needed.⁸⁵ It was certainly convenient; leases tended to be short in Munich and the Sickerts moved flat three times over the next four years.⁸⁶

The Munich in which they established themselves was a thriving if rather pretentious little town, with a population of some 130,000. Although medieval in origin, it was very much a modern city, exuding a sense of newness, freshness, and cleanliness. Many of the recently built houses had little front gardens, and many of the streets were lined with trees. Munich was self-consciously proud to be the capital of Bavaria, and the home of its royal house. The Wittelsbach monarchs – the recently abdicated Ludwig I and the reigning Maximilian II – had conceived the city as a centre of culture and style. They had laid out broad avenues and spacious parks. They had erected a succession of mock-classical and mock-Renaissance buildings to complement the few pre-existing Gothic and baroque churches. The Wittelsbachs had also established important collections of art – the classical sculptures of the Glyptotech, the old masters of the Kunstmuseum, and the new masters of the Neukunst Museum. Munich was full of ‘new masters’, or would-be new masters. The numerous major building projects, the prospects of royal patronage, and the high quality (as much as the low price) of the Bavarian beer, made Munich a focus for painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, and artists of every sort and every nationality.

There were, according to one resident writing at the beginning of the 1860s, ‘about a thousand artists in Munich’. They constituted a distinct and lively social group. They were noted for their conviviality, their ‘love of amusement and pageant’.⁸⁷ They ‘congregated and made merry with cheap Künstlerfesten’, some more formal than others.⁸⁸ Every few years they would arrange an elaborate ‘costume ball’, taking over the main rooms of the Odeum and transforming them with fantastical decorations, before transforming themselves with no less fantastical costumes. Each spring the artists would decamp en masse to the wooded hills south of the city to celebrate a May-fest with dining, dancing, and revelling. Nor was it just artists who were drawn to Munich. The low cost of living in Bavaria encouraged a sizeable contingent of foreigners, and particularly of English people, to settle in the city. Food was inexpensive; there were no rates; and servants were easy to come by. In 1860 a fixed sterling income went further in Munich than in almost any other capital in Europe.

The cosmopolitan and artistic ambience of the city ensured that Eleanor felt none of the isolation that removal to a new and foreign world might have otherwise entailed. She found two supportive groups ready to welcome her: the artists and the English. Oswald Sickert’s long connection with Munich had given him a place near the heart of the city’s artistic community. Despite his commitments to the Fliegende Blätter, he continued to produce his own work as well, and to exhibit it at the Munich Kunstverein.⁸⁹ He had many artist friends (Füssli and Willich had returned to the city from Paris); and Eleanor, with her knowledge of German, was able to welcome them, first at Schwanthalestrasse and then at a new flat in Augustenstrasse. There were English artists, too, in Munich, and many of these were drawn into the Sickerts’ convivial circle, along with other less artistic compatriots. Although there was an English ‘Minister Plenipotentiary’ at the Bavarian court,⁹⁰ the main focus for the expatriate community was provided by the Anglican chaplaincy. There was at that time no actual church, but the congregation gathered for services each Sunday either at one of the new hotels or in a room at the Odeum.⁹¹

It was there that the Sickerts had their first-born child christened, barely a year after their arrival at Munich.⁹² Anne Sheepshanks, though she does not appear to have come over for the ceremony, agreed to stand as godmother to the young Walter Richard. And she must have been glad that the memory of her beloved brother was preserved in the boy’s middle name. For Eleanor, the choice may have served in part as an expiation of the lingering guilt and remorse that she felt over her (imagined) part in hastening Richard’s end. It was also an acknowledgement (and perhaps a projection) of the link between the Sickerts and their wealthy relatives. Walter was brought up with a lively sense of his maternal grandfather’s importance: the ‘89,500 micrometer observations’ that he made in the cellars of Somerset House became part of the family folklore.⁹³

The infant Walter Richard was an adored first child. His name was instantly familiarized to ‘Wat’. His birth precipitated a move to a first-floor flat at 25 Blumenstrasse. Perhaps there was more room at the new address. There certainly needed to be. Mr and Mrs Sickert – both only, and lonely, children – seem to have been determined to create the full and happy family life that they had never known. Barely eighteen months after Walter’s arrival a second child was born, christened Robert. And only a year after that, a third son. Following the tradition of choosing names that worked both in English and German, he was called Bernard or, more Teutonically, Bernhard.* So brisk was the succession of infants that Bernhard had to be suckled by a wet nurse.⁹⁴

The advent of siblings did nothing to dilute the infant Walter’s power and position. He was very much the eldest child. As a toddler he was precocious, winning, and lovely to look at. Eleanor, in later years, ‘never wearied of telling about his beauty and his perfect behaviour as a baby’ – rather to the irritation and surprise of his younger siblings who knew him as a less docile (though still beautiful) child.⁹⁵ He had, too, a natural gift for self-dramatization. Even at the age of three his sudden entrance into the family sitting room one evening was so arresting that his parents’ friend Füssli, who was visiting, insisted on painting him. The picture – a life-size representation of the very young Walter holding an apple while clad only in a short nightshift, his huge mop of flaxen curls surrounding a ‘rosy face and solemn blue eyes’ – was in due course presented to the family and prominently hung in the living room. Walter grew up under this quasi-heroic image of himself. In later years he would describe it as his ‘first appearance on any stage as Hamlet’. It was clear that, even at the age of three, he had a desire to play the title role.⁹⁶

The picture must also have served as a reminder of his everchanging appearance. The following year he effected the first of what would be many dramatic transformations. Or rather it was effected for him. ‘Wat’s head looks like a broom,’ his mother wrote, ‘now that the long curls are off.’ The short crop was perhaps well suited to his physique and temperament. ‘He is an immense fellow,’ his mother declared proudly, ‘taller and broader than the generality of boys at his age’, though she did admit that he had still ‘such a baby face’. This cherubic face, it was noted, masked a fearsome will: ‘He is very perverse and wayward, and wants a very tight hand.’ Too much ‘tenderness’ enabled him ‘to give way to his temper’.⁹⁷ The tight hand, however, was one that only Eleanor could employ. Later in the same year she was remarking, Walter is not very easy to leave with the servants, I can make him mind without much trouble. With them He is master.’⁹⁸ There was, however, no doubting his intelligence. He delighted in books, and with only the minimum of parental encouragement taught himself to read and write before he was four.⁹⁹

In 1864, King Maximilian died and was succeeded by his son, the Wagner-loving eccentric Ludwig II – someone more ‘perverse and wayward’ than even the 4-year-old Walter Sickert. At almost the same moment, Mrs Sickert gave birth to a fourth child, a girl, christened Helena but known (like her mother) as Nellie. The ever-expanding young family moved once again, to a flat on the first floor at No. 4 Kleestrasse.¹⁰⁰ This new address became the Sickerts’ most longstanding Munich home. It was set in a short cross-street running between the Bayerstrasse and the Schwanthalestrasse, close to the large park-cum-showground, the Theresienwiese, where the city’s annual Oktoberfest was held. Comforts were rather sparse. If there were no rates to pay on the flat, it was because no services were provided. There was no piped gas, no running water, and, of course, no water closet. There was, however, a maid to help with fetching and carrying, with getting wood for the fires, and water for the basins.

Life in the new flat was crowded, even cramped, but happy. Although there were regular excursions to the shops, to the Botanical Gardens (to feed the fish) and to the Theresienwiese (to roll on the grass), the whole family spent much of each day indoors. There was no nurse and no nursery. Eleanor sat, looking over the four young children in the living room, sewing and mending, while Oswald worked in a small adjoining studio room.¹⁰¹ Mrs Sickert was blessed with the rare ‘health and energy and courage’ necessary to bring up a large family on a small income. Food, she made sure, was always plentiful and nourishing, if simple – very simple. Jam was a rare event; sweets a once-a-year Christmas treat. Even birthdays were marked only with ‘plain cake’. The Sickerts adopted the Bavarian custom of having their main meal at midday. A rather frugal ‘tea’ of bread, butter, and milk, eaten at six, represented the children’s evening meal. The parents had a later but scarcely less frugal supper.¹⁰² Bread, rice, potatoes, oats and sago were the abundant staples of the Sickert table. They were often combined with the notoriously thin Bavarian milk into what the family called ‘pluffy puddings’.* It was a regimen of unexampled blandness which goes some way to explaining Walter’s later relish for the good things of French, Italian, and even British cuisine. Nevertheless, throughout his life, at times of crisis he would seek solace in the comforting familiarity of rice pudding or bread-and-milk.

Mrs Sickert was what her daughter called ‘an admirable baby mother’, with a real love of young children and a real gift for keeping them occupied, amused, and in order.¹⁰³ Under her direction, Walter and his siblings devised their own entertainments. There was little money for toys, and it was thought better that they should make their own. Their mother’s workbasket was the principal source of materials, as they constructed miniature box carts with cotton-reel wheels, or transformed wooden button moulds into spinning tops. Their father’s old cigar boxes became ‘blocks of flats’, fitted out with acorn furniture. There was, however, a constant danger that the play – invariably led by Walter – would grow wild. Oswald Sickert was not a natural ‘baby father’. He had a ‘highly nervous’ temperament and found the stress of weekly deadlines and daily distractions hard to endure. Sometimes he would startle the children by bursting into the living room, interrupting their games with a despairing plea, ‘Can’t you keep these children quieter?’ He would, as Helena recalled, immediately regret the outburst; his wife ‘had only to turn reproachful eyes on him to bring his arms round her and a tender plea for forgiveness. Then he would steal away and we would look guiltily at each other and behave like mice.’¹⁰⁴ But even without such irruptions, the children’s spells of furious practical activity alternated with ‘periods of silent contemplation’. Walter might take up a book. He was a voracious reader throughout his childhood.¹⁰⁵ And Mrs Sickert would sometimes lay the flat tin top of the travelling bath on the floor and say it was a raft, on which the children would clamber aboard and ‘drift away on dim voyages’ of the mind.¹⁰⁶

It was a cultured home. Music played a large part in family life. Mrs Sickert sang constantly at her work as she watched over her brood. Most evenings she and Oswald would make music together, Oswald accompanying her as she sang, and then playing on for ‘an hour or so’ on his own. Beethoven and Schumann were favourites.¹⁰⁷ In the Munich of Ludwig II it was impossible to escape entirely from the music of Wagner. His operas were performed frequently at the Hoftheater, breaking up the more conventional repertoire of Meyerbeer, Mozart, Halévy, Weber, and Rossini.¹⁰⁸ Mr and Mrs Sickert went. Eleanor felt that perhaps one Wagner opera was enough.¹⁰⁹ Oswald, however, was more intrigued. When the ‘Ring Cycle’ was published and a friend brought round the full orchestral score of the four operas, Oswald, in a bravura display of sight-reading, played it straight through, adapting the music to the piano as he went along, the friend scurrying ahead, turning the pages as fast as he could.¹¹⁰

Although the infant Walter listened with interest to the talk about Wagner and the ‘mad king’, and enjoyed the constant flow of music and song that ran through 4 Kleestrasse, there remained a certain distance to his appreciation. Unlike his younger siblings – particularly Bernhard – he had ‘no musical gift at all’ and was not able even to ‘sing true’.¹¹¹ He showed a more ready aptitude for the household’s other main preoccupation: art. The evidences of Oswald Sickert’s profession were all around the flat. And although his studio room may have been sacrosanct, his paintings were on view, as were works by his father and by his friends. His artist confrères were constant visitors. Füssli, besides painting the 3-year-old Walter, executed a ‘charming’ Ingres-like portrait of Mrs Sickert in her black moiré-antique dress with white lace collar, her hair framing her face in ‘smooth shining rolls’.¹¹² Surrounded by such examples it was not surprising that the ‘chief pleasure’ of Walter – and of his brothers – was ‘painting, drawing and modelling in wax’.¹¹³ More time was spent in artistic endeavour than in anything else. Almost none of Walter’s puerile production has survived. There is, however, nothing to suggest he was a prodigy. Nevertheless, even at five it seems that, unlike the vast majority of children, he was more concerned to record what he saw, rather than to escape into the realms of the imagination. Mrs Sickert sent one friend a ‘rather crude drawing’ by the 5-year-old Walter of Helena as a babe in arms.¹¹⁴

Mrs Sickert was ‘at home’ at Kleestrasse on Thursday afternoons, and often received visitors.¹¹⁵ The growth of the family enhanced rather than diminished the Sickerts’ thriving social life. There were several other families with young children who gravitated towards them. Eleanor was befriended by the Edward Wilberforces, a young couple who had one son the same age as Robert and another christened only three weeks after Helena. Edward Wilberforce had left the Navy after getting married (to an American with the arresting name of Fannie Flash) and was preparing for a career at the Bar. He had devoted his time in Munich to writing an entertaining and opinionated book on the life of the town.¹¹⁶ Although there was no ‘English Doctor’ in Munich, Dr Heinrich von Ranke (grand-nephew of the great historian), who had a practice in Carlstrasse, was a keen Anglophile who spoke excellent English.¹¹⁷ A specialist in treating children, he became the Sickerts’ family doctor and a good friend. Dr Ranke was mildly eccentric, full of ‘German fun’ and fond of practical jokes; his tiny wife was – like Oswald Sickert – a ‘Schleswig-Dane’ and – like Eleanor – the daughter of an English astronomer.¹¹⁸ They too had a bevy of young children, playmates for the infant Sickerts.¹¹⁹

Shortly after the Sickerts’ move to Kleestrasse, Johann Jürgen Sickert came down from Altona to visit the family in their new home and to see his grandchildren. He was only sixty-one and it was a surprise when, not long after his return home, he died. He was found early one morning at his studio, dead in his chair, in front of his easel.¹²⁰ Oswald Sickert had to go and sort out his affairs. He discovered his native town in a curious and unhappy condition. In the summer of 1864 the Prussians, together with the Austrians, had engineered another quarrel with Denmark. It had led to a very brief military confrontation in which the Prusso-Austrian alliance had comprehensively defeated the Danes. The spoils of their victory were the longdisputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Altona and its citizens had ceased to be subject to the Danish crown. Oswald Sickert – like his father (and his son) – was neither political nor nationalist. Art and music were his concerns. During his long residence in Munich he had come to regard himself as a Bavarian-German of liberal tendencies.¹²¹ But the unrest of war and the clear signs of Prussia’s military ambitions in Europe were unsettling. Back in Munich, Eleanor announced that she was ‘growing fidgety’.¹²²

It was also an unsettling time for the young Walter. Eleanor was becoming increasingly alarmed at his health: ‘Wat looks very pale and thin,’ she reported, ‘but he eats and drinks and sleeps & walks any distance.’ He could still manage a trip to the Botanical Gardens to feed the ducks, but found it hard to concentrate for long. Even the prospect of earning a coin for learning to spell some new words was not enough to sustain his interest. He soon grew tired.¹²³ Munich was known to have a less than healthy climate. Infant deaths were common. (Eleanor was later told by Dr Ranke that she was the only mother on his books to have ‘borne four children and brought them alive out of infancy in the city’.) The ‘high bitter air’ was liable to cause bronchial problems, and indeed all the Sickert children suffered regularly from croup. Walter’s complaint, however, was of a different order. The reason for his pallor and lassitude was discovered to be some sort of intestinal blockage or abscess. This seems to have developed into an anal fistula as the body, seeking a new outlet, opened up a narrow channel between the lower part of the rectum and the skin around the anus. An operation became necessary to close up the wound, and restore the natural channel. It was a problematic business. The fistula was kept from healing by the constant entrance into it of material from the bowel. The first attempt by the Munich doctors was unsuccessful. And so was the second. By the middle of 1865, Walter was still suffering.¹²⁴

That summer, Eleanor took the family to Dieppe. It was a punishing journey to make with four small children, in a train without lavatory compartments or buffet car.¹²⁵ But the town held such a special place in her affections that she wanted to introduce her offspring to its charms – to the old streets, the castle on its cliff, the Gothic churches of St Jacques and St Remy, to the quaint onion-domed Casino, the long pebbly beach, the bracing northern sea, to the school house on the slopes of Neuville that had been her youthful home; and – of course – to Mrs Slee and her daughters. It was Walter’s first experience to a town that would become at different times his home, his refuge, and his inspiration.

It was also his first introduction to his godmother. Anne Sheepshanks came over from England, full of kind thoughts and offers of practical help. Her first scheme of assistance was to increase and formalize the allowance that she made to Eleanor and establish it under a trust.* Her second concern was Walter’s health. After the failure of the two Munich operations, she believed that nothing short of a London specialist would suffice. The acknowledged centre for rectal surgery was St Mark’s Hospital, in London’s City Road, and it was arranged that Oswald Sickert would bring Walter over to London in October. As Miss Sheepshanks no longer had a house in town, she rented one – at Duncan Terrace, Islington – close to the hospital.¹²⁶

The expedition, following directly upon the holiday at Dieppe, gave Walter a foretaste of another of his future motifs. It was, however, the drama of the operation, and his central part in that drama, rather than Islington’s well-proportioned Georgian terraces, that seems to have impressed him most. It became another of the key points in his personal mythology. ‘Islington,’ he liked to claim in later years, ‘has always been kind to me. My life was saved at the age of five … [at] St Mark’s Hospital in the City Road.’ He was proud of the fact that the operation was carried out by Alfred Cooper – then the hospital’s Assistant Surgeon, but later a VD specialist and then a knight (and finally the father-in-law of Lady Diana Cooper).¹²⁷ After the operation Walter and his father stayed on at Duncan Terrace for three weeks.¹²⁸ It was an experience that sharpened Walter’s keen sense of his own separateness, and specialness, within the family. By November, however, they were back at Kleestrasse ready for all the excitements of a Bavarian winter.

It was the season when Munich came into its own. One of Sickert’s abiding childhood memories was of the city in its Christmas finery: dusted with powdery snow; Christmas trees standing on the street corners; and the darkness of the cobbled Dultplatz aglitter with gaily illumined street stalls dispensing such seasonal delicacies as gilt gingerbread and sugar effigies of the Baby Jesus – delicacies which, for once, he was allowed to enjoy. As an adult he sometimes wished that he might be five years old again so that he could experience the thrill of it all afresh.¹²⁹ The informal drama of the Christmas streets found an echo in more conventional performances too. Another cherished recollection was of a visit to the circus, when a troop of elephants had been ridden round the ring by marmosets in fancy Zouave costumes.¹³⁰ It was a first memorable taste of the popular theatre.

But, aside from these festive moments, Munich seems to have left remarkably little impress upon Sickert’s infant mind. In later life he spoke of it rarely, and never with enthusiasm. Although he was so responsive to the poetry of other places, Munich’s broad avenues and mongrel buildings did not excite him. Its treasures remained unknown: the fashion for taking very young children around art galleries had not begun. He could not escape Otto Klenze’s colossal statue of ‘Bavaria’ – represented as a sixty-foot-high bronze female holding a wreath above her head – which dominated the Theresienwiese, but it failed to impress him. Commissioned by Ludwig I, it was – Sickert claimed in later years – one of the things that first convinced him of the folly of state sponsorship of the arts.¹³¹

He preferred the countryside around the town, and came to know it well. From the moment that the May-fest signalled the beginning of the summer, Munichers would flock to leave the city. The Sickerts joined this annual exodus, passing a month or two in the Bavarian countryside, lodging with peasants’ families, or staying at country inns. They would visit the little villages dotting the shore of the nearby Starnbergersee – the magnificent lake some sixteen miles long just south of Munich. Or they might venture further afield to other lakes in the Bavarian Tyrol – to the wooded shores of the Chiemsee or to the Staffelsee. In an alfresco variation of their Munich life, Oswald would sketch and paint, while Eleanor would look after the children. In the evening they would all gather in the biergarten of the inn.¹³²

There were also happy outdoor days spent with the family of the Revd Rodney Fowler, the sometime rector of Broadway in Worcestershire, who became the English chaplain at Munich in 1866. He and his wife, arriving with two daughters, aged five and two, had been at once drawn into the Sickerts’ circle.¹³³ The Sickerts also paid visits to Laufzorn, the Rankes’ country house. The place, a former hunting lodge of the kings of Bavaria, was supposedly haunted, which may have added to the excitement of the visits.¹³⁴ But the main pleasure for the children was in playing in the huge echoing banqueting room, which contained an improvised swing – a long plank on which several children could sit astride while it was swung, fearfully, lengthways. As Helena recalled, ‘Every child had to cling tightly to the one in front and the exercise was performed to a chorus of “Hutsche-Kutscher-Genung!” the last word being shouted as loud and as long as possible.’ There was also a big hay barn where the children could jump from the rafters into the hay below.¹³⁵

Walter delighted in such games and in such company. He was extremely sociable and made friends easily.¹³⁶ Surrounded by boys at home, he seems to have enjoyed being surrounded by girls elsewhere. At the age of six he had managed to become engaged both to one of Dr Ranke’s daughters and to the eldest of Mr Fowler’s girls. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he remarked, when looking back on the arrangement, ‘that there was any inconsistency.’ It was an attitude of mind that he preserved in his relations with the female sex throughout his life.¹³⁷

The Bavarian summers were months of almost idyllic pleasure for the children. It was in the Starnbergersee that Walter discovered the delights of swimming, and there, too, that he learnt to fish.¹³⁸ Initially, he had merely tied a piece of bread to a length of string and watched the fishes nibble, but Mr Fowler, steeped in the sporting traditions of the Anglican clergy, showed him – much to Eleanor’s dismay – how to bait a hook. Death, however, seems to have intrigued Walter. One holiday game involved the construction of a miniature cemetery from pebbles and moss and twigs.¹³⁹ In Walter’s memory these summers took on the hues of a golden age. He would look back to them as a time of peace, calm, and certainty. ‘When I used to play by mill streams in Bavaria [and] listened to my mother sing the Schoener Muller of Schubert,’ he recalled, ‘I thought it would always be like that.’

The extraordinary beauty of the Bavarian countryside in early summer – the greenness of the foliage, the clearness of the light, the profusion of flowers – made a profound and lasting impression on all the Sickert children. Walter, though he became the great artist of urban life and urban architecture, retained always a flickering sense that ‘woods & lakes & brooks’ were ‘the nicest things in the world’.¹⁴⁰ It was the quality of light that made them special: the fall of broken sunshine through the overarching canopy of leaves. ‘I think,’ he declared, ‘the loveliest thing in Nature is a sous-bois.’¹⁴¹ Even as a child he sought to express his admiration in art. From the age of five he wanted to paint such verdant, sun-dappled scenes. It became one of the recurrent desires of his working life – recurrent, in part, because it was never achieved.¹⁴²

In all the Sickert children’s games and activities Walter took the lead. Although Mrs Sickert maintained a clear structure of kindly authority, she rarely attempted any interference between her offspring, and would not countenance ‘tale bearing’. It was her principle that they should all learn to live together.¹⁴³ This was a situation that rather suited Walter, who was ‘not only the eldest, but by far the cleverest’, and the most energetic of the siblings.¹⁴⁴ Robert was a fretful child, Bernhard a fractious one, and Helena too young to exert her own considerable powers.¹⁴⁵ From the outset, Walter imposed his will upon them all, getting his own way either by force of character or by guile – though he was not above climbing out of his cot in the nursery to pull his sister’s hair if he felt the occasion warranted.¹⁴⁶ But, as Helena admitted, even at this young age ‘he was able to infuse so much charm into life’, and to make ‘our pursuits so interesting’, that ‘we were generally his willing slaves’.¹⁴⁷ It became one of Mrs Sickert’s recurrent complaints that none of the siblings was able to ‘resist’ Walter, an indication – as Helena noted – that not all his activities were agreeable to authority. Walter, however, was a fickle leader, with no sense of responsibility to his followers. His restless intelligence needed the stimulation of constant change. For his siblings, the ‘tragedy’ came – and came frequently – when ‘the magician suddenly took flight to some other adventure and the one which had seemed so entrancing, while [Walter] led it, turned to folly in the grey morning after’.¹⁴⁸

From a very young age Walter was regarded as being separate from and above his younger brothers. The phrase ‘Walter and the boys’ was a common and early family coinage.¹⁴⁹ He enjoyed a privileged position as the eldest child. In the evenings he alone was allowed to sit up with his parents, not to supper, but at the supper table.¹⁵⁰ Oswald Sickert’s long working hours and occasional absences encouraged Walter to develop a sense almost of responsibility towards his mother. In later years he would describe how, during his Munich childhood, he was ‘for many years’ her ‘only rational companion’.¹⁵¹ He alone amongst his siblings established a bond with his father. The other children were slightly frightened of ‘Papa’. It seemed that he never spoke to them unless it was to give an order or to make some disparaging comment.¹⁵² But then he did not speak very much to anyone. He was extremely taciturn and reserved by nature.¹⁵³ Walter, however, he did talk to – after his own fashion. The trip to London had fostered relations between them. Walter always held dear the memory of his father’s kindly face looking down at him as he sank under the anaesthetic before the operation – a perhaps rare intimation of tenderness from his diffident parent.¹⁵⁴ It was with Walter that Oswald Sickert took his daily walk on the Theresienwiese.¹⁵⁵ And he impressed his son with his few words. He had, as Walter recorded, ‘a wide critical comprehension’. And though he was apt to judge himself as ‘coldly as he did everything else’, there seems to have been an edge of wit to his verdicts.¹⁵⁶ Many years later, when reading Heine, Sickert was struck by the similarities between the poet’s self-deflating irony and his father’s own ‘expressions & attitude of spirit’. They came, he noted, from the same northern, Baltic world.¹⁵⁷

Even as a child, Walter was interested in his father’s work – his paintings and, more particularly, his drawings. The arrival at 4 Kleestrasse of the Fliegende Blätter on Thursday evenings at supper time was ‘an event’ in Walter’s week, and not merely because he was presented with the paper wrapper to wear as a cap. He was interested to hear his father’s comments on the reproduction of the wood engravings. And he liked to look at the pictures. Many of the images lived with him throughout his life.* And although it was perhaps the comedy of the situations depicted that provided the initial attraction, he also imbibed an understanding of technique and an appreciation of how scenes of everyday life could be rendered in art. The quality of work in the paper was extremely high and the variety instructive. When he came to review the artistic masters of his Munich childhood Sickert singled out the work of Wilhelm Diez, Wilhelm Busch, and particularly Adolf Oberlander, whom he praised for his ‘frankness’ and his genius for rendering scenes ‘in terms of limpid light, and shade’.¹⁵⁸ The set of bound copies of the Fliegende Blätter became part of the Sickert family library and Walter had plenty of opportunities to refresh his memory and refine his knowledge of its artists, but the foundation of his appreciation and understanding was laid in his early childhood.¹⁵⁹

During the summer of 1866 the anxieties that Oswald and Eleanor had felt about the political situation in Europe were confirmed. The Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, having carefully prepared the ground, engineered a dispute with Austria as a pretext for laying claim to Holstein. In what became known as the Seven Weeks War, the Prussians decisively defeated their former allies and their associates (nine German states, including Bavaria, had sided with the Austrians). In August, a peace treaty was signed at Prague giving Prussia full control of both Schleswig and Holstein. A new German constitution was established, and it was decreed that all citizens of Schleswig-Holstein would become naturalized Prussians in October of the following year. Oswald Sickert was concerned at the effect this might have on his young family. He did not wish his sons to be liable at some future date to conscription into the Prussian army (and he was anxious, too, that they should not become what he called ‘Beer-swilling Bavarians’).¹⁶⁰ The idea of moving to England took serious hold. It was, however, an operation that required some planning.

Walter, in the meantime, began attending a local school, and his brothers soon followed him. It was a huge, impersonal place. Each class had between fifty and eighty boys, and pupils were drawn from all backgrounds. Robert found the noise and the number of boys altogether too much, but Walter remained unfazed. He got on ‘very nicely’, his mother reported: ‘He does not learn much, they do nothing but German & reckoning and these public schools are so large that the bright ones always have to keep pace with the slow ones.’¹⁶¹ Walter, in his mother’s informed – if not unbiased – opinion, was very definitely one of ‘the bright ones’.

By November 1867 the Sickerts’ plans for moving to England were well advanced. Anne Sheepshanks had given her blessing to the scheme. The Sickerts left Munich the following spring. Walter does not appear to have considered it a deracination. Although in the anti-German decades of the twentieth century he always enjoyed the shock that could be produced by announcing to an English audience that he was a ‘Münchener Kind’l’, he never thought of himself as a German or a Bavarian.¹⁶² He retained a passing enjoyment of German literature and relish for the tricks of the German language.¹⁶³ But these were surface pleasures; they left very little mark on his character. Duncan Grant, who came to know Sickert well, considered that there was ‘very little of the German’ in his make-up.¹⁶⁴ Sickert himself admitted only to having ‘a certain German quality, which is called in German sächlich – devoted to things, ideas, etc. – to the possible disadvantage of people’, a quality by which he excused his often disparaging critical comments upon the work of his friends.¹⁶⁵ But while he certainly did possess this cool, critical, northern trait, he was more likely to have inherited it from his father than to have imbibed it amidst the hurly-burly of the Munich Volksschule.

The Sickerts, on leaving Munich, did not go at once to England. They passed a long summer at Dieppe. It was a happy interlude. Walter was even enrolled briefly at the Collège du Dieppe.¹⁶⁶ He exchanged German for French. If he did not have an ear for music he had one for languages. Learning by mimicry rather than book study, his accent ran ahead of his understanding. He would pick up whole passages of French speech and recite them perfectly, convincing Frenchmen that he was a young compatriot. The disadvantage of this trick only came when they answered him and he was unable either to understand or to reply.¹⁶⁷ The experience of being lost for words was a new one to him.

* It became the nucleus of the V&A picture collection.

* The whole area has since been remodelled: the west side of the square has been replaced by the Brunswick Centre, a 1960s shopping and housing development.

* ‘A sun that shines in the morning,/A child that drinks wine,/A woman who knows Latin/Never come to a good end.’

* Sickert preserved a daguerreotype of his grandfather, sitting very still in a dressing-gown and a smoking-cap ‘calculated to turn his pious grandson green with envy’. ‘From the Life’, Morning Post (18 May 1925).

* Though he may not have known it, he too had been born out of wedlock. His parents married in June 1828, four months after his birth.

* On the baptismal register, Bernard’s name is spelled ‘Bernhart’, though he never seems to have used this form. Robert was given the second name ‘Oswald’, like his father.

* ‘Milk and butter are in a state of barbarism,’ reported the travel writer Edward Wilberforce. The butter was often rancid. As to the difference between milk and cream in Munich, ‘a long experience has shown me that cream is milk with water put in it, while milk is water with milk put in it’.

* The trust was set up on 29 June, between Mr and Mrs Sickert, Anne Sheepshanks, and three trustees, Augustus de Morgan, William Sharp, and George Campbell de Morgan (a copy is in the Sutton papers at GUL).

* ‘I remember an illustration in the Fliegende Blätter in the early sixties in which was depicted a little girl guiding her blind grandmother. Finding the road rather even, and therefore tedious, the child from time to time feigned an obstacle, a brick or stone, and said, “Granny, jump,” which the old lady obediently did. When someone remonstrated with the child, she answered, “My grandmother is mine; I may do what I choose with her.”’ ‘The Polish Rider’, New Age (23 June 1910).

II A NEW HOME

My strongest memories of Walter as a boy are of his immense energy

& the variety & resourcefulness of his interests.

(Helena Sickert)

At the end of the summer of 1868 the Sickerts crossed the Channel and settled into a new home at 3 Windsor Terrace, Goldington Road, Bedford.¹ The choice of Bedford was not an obvious one. There were no ties of family or existing friendship to draw them to this small but prosperous county town.² There was no local art society to attract Oswald Sickert, and no illustrated satirical magazine to employ him. The recorded reason for the move was the number of excellent schools in the town. The five establishments endowed by the prosperous ‘Harper Charity’ had made Bedford a pedagogic centre with a staple production, according to one local guide, of ‘educated juvenile humanity’.³ Walter and his two brothers were enrolled at the local free school.⁴ But there was, too, perhaps some general principle of economy behind the choice: Bedford was less expensive than London.

Although Mrs Sickert’s allowance was increased to compensate for Oswald’s loss of salary in resigning from the Fliegende Blätter, the family was still relatively ‘poor’. The three-storey house in Windsor Terrace cost just £50 a year, and came fully stocked with a great deal of ‘mostly hideous’ furniture, built – as Helena remembered it – ‘to withstand the onslaughts of family life’. There were huge pier glasses, ‘a chiffonier with a marble top and curly-wiggly fronts’, and a sofa with three humps, which was soon dubbed ‘the camel’ and upon which it was impossible to lie with any degree of comfort. There was also a mahogany dinner table around which the family sat on chairs ‘with backs carved to represent swans’.⁵ But if Bedford was economical, that was all that could be said for it.

The town was not a success for the Sickerts. Coming from an international centre of music and art to the chill, provincial atmosphere of Middle England was a dispiriting experience. Mr and Mrs Sickert were ‘woefully depressed’.⁶ Their German maid, whom they had brought with them, was appalled. She took an immediate dislike to the place. She abhorred the house’s dirty coal grates and ranges, ‘accustomed as she was to [the] sweet wood ash’ of Bavaria. And she complained at the poor quality of the local beer.⁷ If the beer was bad, the water was worse. Almost as soon as the Sickerts arrived an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the town.⁸ It at once began to work its way through the family. The boys had barely started at their new school when they had to be removed. Walter soon fell ill. Mrs Sickert very nearly died.⁹ Only Oswald Sickert and Robert escaped the worst of it. Mrs Stanley, a family friend from Munich days, came to help with the children during the period of Ellen’s illness and convalescence. She was an ‘adored’ surrogate – vivacious and amusing. She would delight the children with her invented stories, one of which concerned the fantastical exploits of the ‘Black Bull of Holloway’ (probably Sickert’s first introduction to the artistic possibilities of that North London suburb). Mrs Stanley’s only fault was her kindness. She was apt to spoil her charges, and the young Sickerts, doubtless led – as they were in all else – by Walter, took advantage of her.¹⁰

Perhaps to remove his influence, Walter, as soon as he had recovered sufficiently from his illness, was sent, not back to his Bedford day school, but to a small boarding prep school at Reading.¹¹ It was yet another instance of his being singled out for special treatment.¹² Anne Sheepshanks lived nearby, but the proximity must have seemed a cruel jest to the 8-year-old Walter. He felt banished from the comforts of home life. His memories of the school were coloured with Dickensian horror. Many years later he told Virginia Woolf how the place was run by a ‘drunken old woman’ who, amongst her outrages, once beat a boy who had broken his arm while – as he put it – ‘we thirty little wretches lay there cowed’.¹³ The headmistress clearly took pleasure in such acts of cruelty, for it became one of Sickert’s verbal tics, when undertaking some disagreeable task, to remark, ‘And “what is more”, as my horrible old schoolmistress in Reading used to say, “I like it”.’¹⁴ He was very unhappy,¹⁵ and seems to have tried to project himself back to the lost paradise of Kleestrasse, writing home what his mother described as ‘such affectionate letters in such vile German’.¹⁶ In a delicious break from the tedious (and fattening) regimen of ‘bread and butter and sky blue’, he would go for Sunday lunch to his great aunt.* It was at Anne Sheepshanks’ table that he developed a precocious and enduring taste for jugged hare.¹⁷ But his readiest consolation came from work. As Mrs Sickert noted, despite his uneasiness of temper, he was ‘so fond of study’ and showed none of the ‘signs of idleness’ that his two younger brothers were already beginning to evince. Even at the age of nine Walter was ‘all ambition and energy’ – blessed with ‘a most clear head and accurate memory’.¹⁸

The Sickerts persevered at Bedford for a year. But the shock of the typhoid epidemic seems to have convinced them that it was not a suitable place to raise a family. In 1869, after consultation with Anne Sheepshanks, it was decided that they should move up to London.¹⁹ They fixed upon the modestly fashionable – and discreetly ‘artistic’ – quarter of Notting Hill, just across the way from the altogether grander, and more obviously artistic, quarter of Holland Park. Miss Sheepshanks found for them a little half-stucco-fronted house at 18 Hanover Terrace (now Lansdowne Walk), facing on to the communal gardens. It had been built, along with most of the others in the area, in the 1840s and was both slightly smaller and slightly more expensive than their Bedford home.²⁰ There was an attic storey, and a basement, and two decidedly narrow main floors. Living arrangements were cramped. Walter and his two brothers had their bedrooms in the attic. Mr Sickert used one of the first-floor rooms as a studio, while the family ‘lived, worked, ate and played’ in the small red-flock-wallpapered dining room.²¹

By the time the Sickerts left Bedford, the deficiencies of the Reading boarding school were proving impossible to ignore, and Walter made the move to London along with the rest of the family. The relocation was a happy one for all. The Sickerts found old friends and connections. Their house became a sociable and lively place. The confraternity of painters came forward to welcome Oswald, among them several artists whom he had known from his days at Altona, Munich, and Paris. The sculptor Onslow Ford had worked at Munich and had married a friend of the Sickerts there.²² Frederic Burton, a student at Munich in the 1850s and now a successful and fashionable practitioner, called on the family. (Oswald was shocked, on entering the room, to discover one of his sons – almost certainly Walter – showing Burton through a bound volume of the Fliegende Blätter, pointing out the paternal drawings.)²³ Hugh Carter, an artist who had spent time at Altona and married a girl from Hamburg, turned out to be a near neighbour at 12 Clarendon Road.²⁴ The Sheepshanks name carried a weight and prestige in London that it rather lacked in provincial Bedford. In the capital, the achievements of the Revd Richard Sheepshanks and the munificence of his brother John were established facts. And this family fame reflected faintly on the Sickerts, giving them both a glow of glamour and – more importantly – a ‘social position’.²⁵ Although Anne Sheepshanks was living out of London, the many friends she had in town provided a supportive structure for the young family. It was almost certainly through the influence of her friends the de Morgans that, in October 1870, Walter was enrolled (after a brief stint at a London ‘Dower School’) at University College School in Gower Street.²⁶

Mrs Sickert conformed to what she considered were the established modes of English life. She took the children to church on Sunday mornings, walking them off to St Thomas’, Paddington, a little iron church off Westbourne Grove.²⁷ It was a temporary structure, but the vicar, the Revd John Alexander Jacob, had a reputation as a preacher (his Building in Silence, and Other Sermons was published by Macmillan in 1875). Oswald Sickert did not attend, although, as a ‘tolerant minded agnostic’, he accompanied the family as far as the corner nearest the church and often met them coming out. The young Sickerts’ own involvement with proceedings was only slightly more engaged. Although they learnt the ‘Collect for the day’ and were taught their catechism by Mrs Sickert, their approach was so formal that, when asked ‘What is your name?’ they were liable to reply, ‘N or M as the case may be’.²⁸ Walter showed no inclination towards the spiritual side of life. But churchgoing did have its social compensations. The Carters attended St Thomas’; and the Sickerts as they trooped up Holland Walk would also encounter the Raleighs, a lively family of one boy and five girls, children of the Revd Alexander Raleigh, who lived nearby.²⁹

The move to England had a particular impact upon Oswald Sickert’s position. From being a cosmopolitan figure in a cosmopolitan milieu, he found himself a foreigner in an essentially English one. English, though he spoke it perfectly, was not his native – or even his second – tongue. Moreover, he no longer had a job or an income. Mrs Sickert wanted to make over to him the allowance that she received, but the terms of her trust made that impossible. Instead she drew her cheque every month and then handed over the cash to her husband, ‘so that she might have the pleasure of asking him for it, bit by bit’. Helena vividly recalled the playing out of this little charade: ‘It was her luxury to pretend he gave it to her, and his eyes would smile at her as he drew out his purse and asked, “Now how much must I give you, extravagant woman?” And she would say humbly, “Well, Owlie, I must get some serge for the little ones’ suits, and a new hat for Nell, and I want to bring back some fish. Will fifteen shillings be too much?” So she would get a pound and think how generous he was.’³⁰ The fiction was a happy one but it could not quite obscure Oswald’s new, dependent status.

There were, in theory, some advantages to his new condition. Freed from the necessity of hackwork, he could rededicate himself exclusively to painting. London was a not unpropitious place for such a project. Compared to Munich, where the Kunstverein had exercised a virtual monopoly on exhibitions, there were several exhibiting groups and even a few commercial art galleries at which he could show. There were art collectors too. The example of John Sheepshanks had inspired several imitators, as the wealth generated by Britain’s ever expanding industrial and commercial imperium sought expression and dignity through art. With such patronage, artists were beginning to grow rich. The new mansions of Holland Park, with their lofty studio-rooms, were monuments to the fortunes being made in paint.³¹

Although Oswald had a painting room in the house, he soon took on a separate studio in Soho Square as well. Soho was some distance from Notting Hill, but it was close to Gower Street, and Oswald would walk the three and a half miles to UCS each morning with his eldest son. The link between them was reinforced. Walter would show off to his father. One of the challenges he undertook was to learn by heart the exotic polysyllabic name of the Indian Maharaja whose tombstone stood in the churchyard they passed each day. (Over seventy years later Sickert was still able to rattle off the name: Maharaja Meerzaram Guahahapaje Raz Parea Maneramapam Murcher, KCSI.)³² He was initiated, too, into his father’s professional world, accompanying him to buy materials at Cornelissen, the artists’ supply shop in Bloomsbury.³³ The daily excursions into town, however, also made Walter aware of his father’s semi-alien status in their new home. Whenever they passed the shop of the friendly local cobbler, the man, ‘thinking in the English way, that it was necessary to shout and explain things to all foreigners, however well they spoke English’, would point at his display of porpoise-hide bootlaces and ‘roar at the top of his voice, “Papooze’s ‘ide!”’³⁴ Perhaps it was the embarrassment of this daily performance that first inspired the slight note of protectiveness that came to colour Sickert’s view of his father – a protectiveness always mingled with real admiration, piety, and affection.³⁵

The family maintained a European perspective. From the summer of 1870 onwards the unfolding drama of the Franco-Prussian war consumed their attention. Walter followed the rapid succession of French defeats in the pages of the Illustrated London News. It was a conflict that touched the Sickerts with painful closeness, setting familiar Germany against beloved France. Their sympathies lay entirely with the French. It was torture to Mrs Sickert when Dieppe was occupied by Prussian troops in December, and for Oswald when Paris fell at the beginning of the following year. French refugees became a feature of London life. Amongst the self-imposed exiles were several artists: Claude Monet came, and Camille Pissarro. The general exodus also brought a German painter – Otto Scholderer. After training at the Academy in Frankfurt, Scholderer had gone to Paris in 1857 and enrolled at the atelier of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. There he came to know Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and other members of the Parisian studio world. He returned to Paris at the end of the 1860s, and in 1870 Fantin-Latour, whose great friend he had become, included his diffident red-bearded figure, standing behind Edouard Manet, in the group portrait, the Atelier des Batignolles. It is not clear whether he already knew Oswald Sickert before he came to London – he never studied at Munich, nor did the two men coincide at Paris – but they soon became friends. They had a shared love of music, and would often play together, either at Hanover Terrace or at the Scholderers’ house at Putney.³⁶

Such gatherings had a comfortably familiar air. In more ‘English’ society – though the Sickerts found many ready friends – there always remained the faint hint of ambiguity about their exact position. The Sheepshanks connection, so beneficial in all other respects, carried with it the taint of Mrs Sickert’s illegitimate origins – even if the details of those origins were not known to all and were often confused by those who were aware of them. (At least one friend supposed that Mrs Sickert was the natural daughter of John, rather than Richard, Sheepshanks.³⁷) Amongst most members of the ‘artistic’ world Mrs Sickert’s position would have counted for little, but on the broader social plane the possibility of affront and insult – if remote – could never be entirely forgotten. There clung, too, to the family and to the family home, a slight but distinct sense of difference – of foreignness. The Sickerts played German music, sang German songs, and had German books on their shelves.³⁸ They preserved the Munich habit of eating their ‘dinner’ at noon, and having only a light ‘tea’ or ‘supper’ in the evening – a fact that occasionally caused the children embarrassment when English visitors called.³⁹ The family, according with Continental custom, celebrated Christmas on the night of Christmas Eve, and did so in what outsiders considered a ‘high Germanic’ fashion.⁴⁰ These marks of otherness were small, but they were sufficient to give the Sickerts both a sense of closeness amongst themselves and of detachment from the world they found themselves in.

Of these two impulses, ‘detachment’ was the one that touched Walter most strongly. It became his mark as both a person and a painter. And though essentially an innate trait of his character, the tensions of his London childhood sharpened it and gave it direction. Walter did not retreat into his own world. From the start he engaged enthusiastically with English life and English ways. ‘Nobody,’ it was later said of him, ‘was more English.’ But his understanding of Englishness was gained from the outside. It was – as one English friend noted – ‘his northern foreign blood’ that ‘afforded him just the requisite impetus to understand especially well this country and its ways’.⁴¹

The upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War encouraged the Sickerts to spend their holidays in England. In the summer of 1870, Mr Sickert took Walter and the other children to the seaside at Lowestoft. While he sketched and painted, the boys flew kites and built sandcastles. Walter was much impressed too by the sight of a drowned man, and much excited by the sight of the lovely Mrs Swears, the beauty of the season, who would drive up and down the front in her carriage, her long hair streaming in the wind.⁴² In the following years they visited Ilfracombe and Harwich.⁴³

Mrs Sickert did not accompany the family to Lowestoft, perhaps because she was pregnant. At the beginning of 1871, Walter got a new brother. Born on 14 February, he was duly christened Oswald Valentine. To simplify the logistics of family life, Walter was taken out of UCS and sent, along with Robert and Bernhard, to a new school close to Hanover Terrace. The Bayswater Collegiate School was situated at ‘Chepstow Lodge’, 1 Pembridge Villas, on the corner with Chepstow Place, four doors down (as Sickert liked to point out) from the celebrated Victorian genre painter, W. P. Frith. It was run by William T. Hunt, a young man in his early thirties with progressive ideas.⁴⁴

Helena’s chief recollection of her brothers’ schooling was of them being chivvied off by their mother in the morning and then coming home in the afternoon without the books necessary for their prep. In the case of Robert and Bernhard such oversights tended to be the result of inattention; both brothers were what was called ‘dreamy’. If Walter forgot his books, however, it was probably because he was thinking of so many other things. Although he hated organized games, he was always ‘prodigiously energetic’, busy with something outside the school curriculum – acting, drawing, even learning Japanese. There were five Japanese boys at the school, sent to England by their feudal clan – Hachizuka – to study English. (All subsequently rose to positions of prominence in Japan.) Walter adopted them, and brought them back to Hanover Terrace. ‘We liked them better than the English boys,’ Helena recalled. She was particularly fond of Hamaguchi Shintaro – ‘a delightful little fellow’ with ‘exquisite manners’ who could play six games of chess at once.⁴⁵ But it is uncertain how long the close connection lasted. Walter’s enthusiasms for people were not always sustained. Though ‘very sociable and charming’, he had – as his sister put it – ‘a way of shedding acquaintances and even friends’. Sometimes an actual quarrel precipitated the break, but more often there was merely a removal of favour, as his interest shifted on to somebody – or something – new. To the rejected, this exclusion from the charmed radiance of Walter’s friendship tended to come as a horrid and unexpected blow, and it was often left to Mrs Sickert to ‘comfort’ the unfortunates and excuse her son’s fickleness.⁴⁶

Many years later, the novelist Hugh Walpole, describing Sickert’s character, remarked, ‘[he] isolates himself utterly from everybody’. It was not that he was ‘hermit like or scornful of life’. Far from it: he was ‘eager to hear anything about life at all … but his personality is so entirely of its own and so distinctive that he makes a world of his own’. And it is clear that even in childhood these traits were evident. While a person stood in some relation to Sickert’s current interest they enjoyed the favour of access to his world. But his interests changed often. As Walpole noted, there was no limit to them: ‘morals, families, personal habits, colours, games’.⁴⁷ In 1904 Sickert explained to a female friend that he found absolutely everything ‘absorbingly interesting’, that there was ‘no end to the wonderful delights of life’. She felt that he was telling the truth, but considered that ‘such delightful fluency and ease [could] only come either from a dead heart or from a love, like God’s, that had done with personality and material things’.⁴⁸

Walter, as a young child, did give some hints of a capacity for universal love. His mother reported that, while at Munich, he had asked her one night, before saying his prayers, ‘Mama, may I say God Bless all the world? I should like to say it because it would be kind.’⁴⁹ But it seems more probable that his extraordinary relish for the incidents of life was another aspect of his detachment. A ‘dead heart’ is perhaps an unduly pejorative phrase. Although Sickert’s behaviour and his pronouncements, as both a child and a man, could sometimes seem unfeeling, even callous in their unflinching objectivity, there was something grand and invigorating about his enthusiasms, his openness to all sides of life, his refusal to accept hierarchies or to make judgements. He infected others, too, with verve. And though he might abandon his friends, many of them remained loyal to him and his memory even after he had moved on.

Walter’s schoolboy pursuits were legion. Inspired by the Prussians’ defeat of the Emperor Napoleon III, he created a variant of chess, called Sedan, in which the king could be taken.⁵⁰ He also conceived a fascinated interest in the case of the Tichborne Claimant and followed its long unwinding closely. Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, the heir presumptive to the Tichborne Estates at Alresford, Hampshire, had sailed from Rio de Janeiro in 1854 at the age of twenty-five, in a ship that was lost at sea. No survivors were ever found. After the death of his father, Sir James, his younger brother, Alfred, assumed the title and estates, but died in 1866, leaving only an infant son. The old dowager Lady Tichborne, however, had never reconciled herself to the loss of her eldest son, and began to advertise abroad for news of his fate, hopeful that he had perhaps escaped the wreck. She was thrilled to receive word from a man in Australia who claimed to be her longlost boy. The man set sail for England at the end of 1866 and asserted his claim to be the Tichborne heir. In 1867 he was received by Lady Tichborne, who was living in Paris, and was apparently recognized by her as her son, even though there was no obvious physical resemblance, the claimant being a very stout man weighing some twenty stone and Roger Tichborne always having been conspicuously thin. His claim, unsurprisingly, was disputed by other members of the Tichborne family, and the matter went to court.

The trial was long-drawn-out and sensational, with its cast of minor aristocrats, duplicitous servants, old sea dogs, and colonial adventurers. The fat, bewhiskered, rather dignified claimant was the star of the show. Minutely cross-examined about the facts of his supposed early life by a defence intent on proving that he was not Roger Tichborne at all, but Arthur Orton, the opportunistic emigrant son of a Wapping butcher who, anxious to escape from his debts in Wagga Wagga, had embarked upon a career of profitable deception, he remained unperturbed and unperturbable. Public opinion was sharply divided on the question of his bona fides, and remained divided throughout the trial. As Sickert later wrote: ‘We are born believers in or doubters of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne’s identity.’ He was a born believer.⁵¹

His belief took a knock when the case collapsed in March 1871 and the claimant was arrested and charged with ‘wilful and corrupt perjury’. But the blow was not conclusive. The born believers held firm. While on bail awaiting trial (the new case was delayed for over a year) the claimant made a triumphal progress across England. In May 1872 he was given a hero’s welcome and a town parade at Southampton, not far from Alresford. When the second trial finally took place – it ran from February 1873 to February 1874 – the claimant was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. Even so, Sickert refused to relinquish his beliefs completely. ‘Are we even now quite sure,’ he wrote almost sixty years after the event, ‘of the rights in the matter of Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne?’⁵² The case never lost its appeal for him. The story of a relative disappearing into Australia, perhaps one day to return, exciting enough in itself, had an additional resonance for the grandson of Eleanor Henry.

Walter also sought out drama in more conventional settings. He became stage-struck, or Bard-struck. At school they would read Shakespeare with Mr Hunt in the gardens of Pembridge Square. Walter soon purchased his own Globe edition of the works. He was taken by his parents to see Samuel Phelps, the great Shakespearean actor of the day, playing Shylock, Falstaff, Wolsey, Macbeth (and Sir Peter Teazle), and – enraptured by his performances – soon learnt to imitate his manner.⁵³

But always alongside these other enthusiasms ran his constant interest in art. Throughout his schooldays, his sister recalled, ‘his most abiding pleasure was drawing & painting’. The ‘very little pocket money’ he received from his father was put towards buying art materials.⁵⁴ He also looked at pictures. He pored over the popular illustrated weeklies, drinking in the dramatic reportage of the Illustrated London News, the humorous diversions of Punch, and the educational diet of the Penny Magazine.55 He began to be taken to public galleries, and he was excited by what he saw. ‘It is natural to all ages,’ he later remarked, ‘to like the narrative picture, and I fancy, if we spoke the truth, and our memories are clear enough, that we liked at first the narrative picture in the proportion that it can be said to be lurid.’ The young Walter’s ‘uninfluenced interest’ was first captured at the South Kensington Museum by John ‘Mad’ Martin’s swirling, almost cinematic vision of Belshazzar’s Feast and by George Cruikshank’s melodramatic series of prints, The Bottle, depicting the awful and inevitable effects of drink upon a Victorian family.⁵⁶ From the early 1870s onwards, Walter also went with his father to the regular winter loanexhibitions held in the Royal Academy’s gallery at Burlington House.⁵⁷ There he was introduced to the works of the old masters. He ‘loved’ them from the first, perhaps not least because they, too, were often ‘narrative pictures’ and sometimes ‘lurid’.⁵⁸

Almost unconsciously Walter absorbed many of the practical and professional concerns of picture making. At home and elsewhere they were constant elements in the life around him. He spent time too in the studios of his father’s friends. He even posed for a history painting, appearing as a young – and rather gawky – Nelson, in George William Joy’s picture, Thirty Years Before Trafalgar.⁵⁹

In 1873 Mrs Sickert gave birth to her sixth and last child, another boy. He was christened Leonard but was known in the family as Leo.⁶⁰ Walter, however, was far removed from the world of the nursery. He was growing up. In the summer of 1874 the family went to the North Devon village of Mortehoe, renting a cottage from the local publican, Mr Conibear. It was a halcyon summer for Walter. The place was a ‘real favourite’. Several family friends joined them there. Walter helped on the farm, learning to cut and bind wheat, and how to drive a wagon through a gate. He made friends with the Conibear children. One day he discovered an octopus washed up on the seashore and, putting it on to a slate, took it up the hill to show to Professor T. H. Huxley, who was also staying in the village for the summer. The eminent scientist took at once to the inquisitive 14-year-old, and they became friends.⁶¹

An interest in cephalopods was not Walter’s only claim to precocity. He would rise early to help the milkmaids with their work – or, rather, to distract them. Years later, when writing to Nina Hamnett, he told her, ‘If you go to Barnstaple have look at Mortehoe, which I think adorable, probably because I used to make love to the milkmaids there when I was 14.’⁶² Although his love-making may have been no more than flirtation, it is possible that it went further.* The suggestion is easy enough to credit. Walter’s excitement at the holiday is palpable. As early as the following March he was writing to Mr Conibear informing him that his parents would definitely be taking the house again the following summer, and enclosing two sketches – one of Mortehoe parish church, the other of a rocking horse recently given to Oswald Valentine.⁶³

The North Devon headland had charms not only for Walter. His father was inspired by the rugged coastal landscape. One of his paintings, worked up from sketches made that summer, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. It was Oswald Sickert’s first exposure at Burlington House, and built upon his showings at the New Water Colour Society, the Dudley Gallery, and Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ in Pall Mall.⁶⁴ The achievement gave Walter a first, vicarious, savour of the Academy’s extraordinary power as the arbiter of contemporary taste and artistic prestige. It was a pungent taste and one that both attracted and repelled him.

* ‘Sky blue’ was a slang term for bread-and-milk.

* An echo of his happy time with the milkmaids at Mortehoe perhaps lingers in his 1910 rhapsody upon the glorious physical presence of Juno, in Raphael’s The Council of the Gods at the Villa Farnesiana, Rome, with her ‘fleshy lustrous face, like one of Rowlandson’s wenches’; her hands, he remarks approvingly, ‘are gross, material hands, the hands, let us say, of a milkmaid’ (‘Idealism’, New Age, 12 May 1910). Sickert’s friend at Mortehoe, the farmer’s son, David Smith, certainly did get into trouble for getting one of the local farm girls pregnant (information from Mr Conibear’s great-grandson, George Gammon).

III L’ENFANT TERRIBLE

I think I could recommend you a boy.

(G. F. Maclear to Reginald Poole)

Within the family, Walter’s spirit and his domination of his younger brothers were beginning to cause some anxiety. It was decided that he needed a more challenging environment than could be provided by the little school in Pembridge Villas and that he needed to be separated from his brothers, or, rather, they needed to be separated from him. (Helena, whose health was causing some concern, had already been sent away to school at Miss Slee’s now somewhat reduced establishment in Dieppe.¹) After the matter had been inquired into with obvious thoroughness, the boys were divided up between three of London’s leading public schools. Robert went to UCS, and Bernhard to the City of London School (where it was hoped that the formidable Headmaster, Dr Abbot, would ‘cure him of laziness’). Walter was enrolled at King’s College School. He arrived – aged fifteen – for the autumn term of 1875.²

The school was then housed in the basement of the east enfilade of Somerset House, next to King’s College itself. It was essentially a day school, though a few of the 550 pupils ‘boarded’ at the houses of the married masters. The main entrance was on the Strand, where, opposite the gates of St Mary-le-Strand, a broad flight of steps ran down to an inaptly named concrete ‘playground’ in which no games were ever played. Although the school dining room looked out over the river, and at least some of the classrooms were large high-ceilinged spaces level with the street, the principal flavour was one of subterranean gloom and confinement. The place was sometimes referred to, with as much truth as humour, as ‘the dungeon on the Strand’³. The first – and defining – feature of the school was a long, narrow, and dimly lit vaulted corridor off which most of the classrooms led. Dark, even during summer, it was lit by a line of gas lamps that lent their own particular aroma to the inevitable institutional scents of floor polish, cabbage, and unwashed boy. From 11.15 to 11.30 a.m. and from 1 to 1.30 p.m., and at the end of the day’s work, the corridor was generally ‘a pandemonium of yelling, shouting and singing’. Some of the bigger and ‘lustier fellows’ of the Lower School would sometimes amuse themselves by linking arms and rushing down the passage, ‘to the extreme discomfort of those who failed to get out of their way in time’.⁴ For Walter, however, the site was fraught with positive familial associations. It was in the basements of Somerset House that Richard Sheepshanks had carried out his comparative measurements to establish the new official yard.

At King’s College School in the 1870s the syllabus was rigorously limited. In the ‘Classical Division’ to which Sickert belonged the concentration was on Latin and Greek. The study of these was supplemented by courses in mathematics, English literature, French, and divinity. German and drawing were offered as optional extras, and a ‘course of lectures on some branch of experimental science’ was provided as an afterthought.* It was a system that Sickert came to appreciate. Many years later, when visiting St Felix School, Southwold in the late 1920s to give a lecture on art, he was amazed at the number of subjects being taught. There were at least nine different ones included in the weekly timetable. ‘Tiens!’ he exclaimed. ‘Three subjects are enough. Latin, English and Mathematics. Then the pupils may leave school knowing a little about something which would give them confidence which is so necessary for their future studies, instead of nothing about anything at all.’⁵

The school, presided over by the long-serving Revd G. F. Maclear, had established an excellent academic reputation. There were many good and several excellent teachers. Sickert’s form master was the genial Dr Robert Belcher. Walter soon began to flourish under his tutelage. He already had some grasp of both Latin and Greek, but this deepened under the regime of close reading, ‘prose writing’, and Greek verse composition. Walter developed a real familiarity with – and enduring love for – the language and literature of classical antiquity. Without laying claim to being a scholar, he continued to read – and to misquote – the classical authors with relish throughout his life. His particular favourite was the clear-sighted, unsentimental epigrammist Martial.⁶

Sickert, so he claimed, was also ‘naturally and from heredity interested in mathematics’. He would work out geometry propositions on his daily walk to school.⁷ But it was in the modern languages that he really excelled. His polyglot upbringing (and the fact that most of his contemporaries ‘took neither French or German classes very seriously’⁸) gave him ample opportunity to shine. He won the Upper School French Prize in Michaelmas 1876, and the Upper School German Prize the following term. And at the annual prize-giving, at Christmas 1877, he carried off the Vice-Master’s German Prize.⁹

Art was not one of the strengths of King’s College School. Although the great watercolourist John Sell Cotman had taught drawing at the school in the 1830s, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had briefly been a pupil, they had left no enduring legacy. Art was not part of the curriculum and could only be taken as an extra option at the extra cost of a guinea a term.¹⁰ There is no evidence to suggest that Walter ever studied it. Not that he needed the structure of formal classes to stimulate his interest. He drew incessantly, and achieved some recognition for his work amongst his schoolfellows. On one memorable occasion when he was caught drawing caricatures in class, the form master, instead of punishing him, framed the confiscated picture.¹¹

Class work, it seems, only ever absorbed so much of Walter’s attention. He was undaunted by the wider stage of his new school, and soon surrounded himself with new friends, among them the school’s leading scholar, Alfred Pollard, and Alfred Kalisch (who became the music critic for the Daily News).¹² Sickert’s energy and liveliness were captivating, and so were his emerging good looks. One former classmate recalled that even as a schoolboy he had the glamour that attaches to the ‘extremely handsome’.¹³ He delighted in doing the unexpected. One of the Japanese boys from Mr Hunt’s school had also moved to KCS and Walter greatly surprised and impressed his new schoolmates by addressing him in Japanese.¹⁴

Amongst his other pranks was a scheme to undercut the school tuck shop by setting up his own doughnut stall at break time. KCS pupils had long been complaining at the quality of the fare provided by Mr Reynolds – the local baker who ran the tuck shop – and at ‘the enormous profits’ that he made from his monopoly. Like many of Sickert’s later commercial ventures, the doughnut stall was not a financial success and was closed down by the authorities. He sometimes claimed that the scam led to his expulsion from the school, but this was an exaggeration.¹⁵ The headmaster was, on the whole, indulgent of Walter’s irregularities.¹⁶ He was mindful perhaps of his contributions to other areas of school life.

Dr Maclear took a particular interest in the end-of-year performances put on as part of the Christmas prize-giving. A mixed programme was presented with scenes not only from Shakespeare and the other English classics but also from Greek, Latin, French, and German dramas – all done in their original languages. Sickert excelled in these. He earned an early fame for his performance in the late-medieval farce L’Avocat Pathelin, in which his French was considered to be ‘perfect’.¹⁷

Although divinity was a compulsory subject, and each day began with a fifteen-minute service in chapel, the atmosphere of the school was not markedly religious. Walter got confirmed while he was there, but he treated the whole matter with ‘genial cynicism’ and, having been rewarded with the gift of a watch, promptly gave up going to church on Sundays with his mother and siblings.¹⁸ It was just one of the ways in which he started to emancipate himself from family life. While Robert and Bernhard retreated home from their respective schools, becoming more dreamy and inward looking, Walter took off in new directions. He made his own friends and ‘lived a life of his own’.¹⁹

He began to explore London. It teemed outside the school gates. Alfred Pollard recalled that to attend KCS was to have it ‘daily borne in on one … that one [was] a citizen of a great city’.²⁰ A constant tide of human – and animal – traffic passed before the school and through the triple portal of Temple Bar, Wren’s baroque gateway linking the City and the West End – the allied worlds of Business and Pleasure. King’s College School stood, albeit with a certain aloofness, in the world of Pleasure. Despite the nearby presence of the Law Courts, the surrounding area had a hazardous reputation. It was thick with public houses and theatres. The Strand was the most notorious thoroughfare in Central London: no respectable woman would walk down it unaccompanied for fear of being mistaken for a prostitute. North of the school lay Covent Garden, and the disreputable courts and alleys around Holywell Street – centre of the second-hand-book and pornography trades.

For the King’s College School students the pleasures afforded by the area tended to be rather more innocent. As one former pupil remembered, after school (3 p.m. on most days, but 1 p.m. on Wednesdays, and noon on Saturdays) many boys headed off to eat ices at Gatti’s in the Adelaide Gallery, or went to Sainsbury’s, ‘a chemist close to the school who sold splendid iced soda drinks from a fountain’.²¹ Sickert, however, was more adventurous and inquisitive. He was, in the words of one schoolfellow, ‘the cat that walked by itself’. ‘He didn’t care to do our things, he was aloof … but he could be wonderfully good company when he was in the mood. Everyone liked to be asked to walk home with him from school. He never invited more than two of us at a time. He knew North London like the back of his hand, he could tell us endless stories about the little streets and byways as we went along and pointed out pictures that we hadn’t seen.’²²

His journey home would often be broken by a prolonged loiter in Wellington Street, before the office windows of Entr’acte magazine – a review of the contemporary theatrical and music-hall scene. There he could avidly scrutinize the most recent works of the paper’s star artist, Alfred Bryan, that were pinned up for display.²³

Although he admired Bryan’s dashing if rather facile work, and that of several other black-and-white men, his great enthusiasm was for the drawing of Charles Keene. Since 1850, Keene had been one of the leading draughtsmen on Punch. His assured but loosely executed cartoons captured the vital flavours of Victorian popular life with unrivalled brio. Better than any of his contemporaries, it was said, he could ‘emphasise the absurdity of a City man’s hat’, suggest the ‘twist of a drunkard’s coat’ or ‘an old lady’s bombazeen about to pop’. And he did it with a delicacy that often left the viewer in some doubt as to whether it was caricature at all. Keene became Sickert’s first artistic hero.

It was an admiration that he shared with a select band of discerning spirits. Amongst his schoolfriends was a young boarder, a Scot called Joseph Crawhall, whose facility at drawing exceeded even Sickert’s own. Unlike Sickert, he took Mr Delamotte’s optional art classes, and he carried off the Middle School drawing prize in both the Lent 1878 and Summer 1879 terms; he had also exhibited a picture at the Newcastle Arts Association. These were distinctions, however, that counted for little in Sickert’s eyes besides the more important fact that his father – Joseph Crawhall Senior – was a friend of Charles Keene’s. Mr Crawhall would even send Keene jokes from time to time, which the artist might transform into cartoons, sending back a drawing by way of thanks. The presence of these Keene originals on the walls of the Crawhall home was, Sickert believed, the reason for young Joseph’s advanced abilities. He had enjoyed, as Sickert later put it, ‘the advantage of growing up in the most distinguished artistic atmosphere’ available in Great Britain in the late 1870s.²⁴

Sickert, though he had to rely on the printed reproductions in Punch, rather than on originals, steeped himself in the same ‘distinguished’ atmosphere. Outside the circle of aficionados, of course, Keene’s work – though recognized as entertaining – was regarded as anything but distinguished. Keene, to the majority, was no more than a hack cartoonist turning out scenes of vulgar life for a comic weekly, in a style that many considered rather ‘rough’.²⁵ But Sickert – with the example of his own father’s career on the Fliegende Blätter before him – was not inclined to make conventional distinctions between high and low culture; from the start he considered Keene as an artist.

The attractions of Keene’s art to the young Sickert were many. It provided a vivid commentary on the familiar aspects of contemporary life – aspects ignored in most other artworks. From looking at Keene’s drawings Sickert also began to understand the secret of composition. He observed the way in which ‘a situation’ was expressed pictorially by ‘the relationship of one figure to another’, and how figures needed to be conceived ‘as a whole’, rather than being mere appendages of their facial expressions.²⁶ He admired Keene’s eye for the small but telling physical detail. In a picture of a lady remonstrating with her gardener, he would point out delightedly how the artist had drawn the gardener’s trousers, catching ‘the bagginess of the knees’, the result of a lifetime’s weeding: ‘You can see he is a gardener.’²⁷ A love of Keene led Sickert back to discover his forebears: Leech, Cruikshank, Rowlandson, and Hogarth. Bit by bit he pieced together the extraordinarily vigorous tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English graphic art, with its abiding delight in ‘low life’ subjects and suggestive narratives.

In tandem with his enthusiastic study of Keene, Sickert also began to explore the National Gallery. Conveniently placed at the other end of the Strand, in Trafalgar Square, he passed it on his way home from school each day. He ‘saturated’ himself in the collection, and, through the parade of masterpieces, was able to acquaint himself with the outline of Western art history from the Renaissance onwards. (He always retained a belief that ‘chronological’ hanging was the best – indeed the only – way to arrange a major public gallery.²⁸)

The pictorial diet of Keene and the National Gallery gave Sickert an early understanding of the possibilities of art, one that would have been hard to gain at Bedford, or almost anywhere else. As his father remarked with a touch of envy, ‘At your age I had never seen a good painting.’²⁹ But the actual effect of all this stimulation upon Sickert’s own artistic experiments is hard to gauge. Nothing survives. The caricatures that he drew during his school lessons almost certainly reflected his study of Keene, Bryan, and the other popular cartoonists. There is no trace of either Punch or the old masters, however, in the small, well-constructed drawing of a girl sitting by a river, done in the summer of 1876 on the family holiday to the island of Fohr, off the Schleswig coast.* And it was the desire to imitate his father’s Bavarian sous-bois scenes that led him, the following summer, to take his gouaches to Kensington Gardens in order to try and capture the effects of sunlight falling through trees.³⁰

The National Gallery was not the only cultural institution that Sickert began to frequent, nor was Charles Keene the only object of his schoolboy idolatry. Almost immediately opposite the gates of King’s College School stood the entrance to the Lyceum Theatre. Since 1871 it had been under the management of Mr and Mrs Bateman. They had taken the theatre as a showcase for the talents of their third daughter, Isobel, and had engaged the 33-year-old and barely known Henry Irving as their leading man. The theatre had a commercial reputation for being ‘unlucky’, which the early Bateman productions did little to overturn. But – at the end of that first year – Irving persuaded his employers to allow him to mount a production of Leopold Lewis’s horror-piece The Bells. The play proved an immediate and spectacular success. Irving was raised suddenly to a glorious prominence – and the Lyceum was raised with him. His talent, charisma, and commercial acumen transformed the faltering playhouse into one of the leading venues in London. He came effectively to run the place. It was he who chose the productions, took the title roles, and drew the crowds. His style of acting was something strangely new and different, almost overwhelming in its intensity. His readings of the classic parts were often very different from those of theatrical convention, charged with a new sense of psychological truth. But in every role he was recognizably Irving. Whatever the costume, he was a curious and unforgettable figure with his gaunt features, distinctive mannerisms, peculiar pronunciation, and halting gait. But if he commanded attention, he also divided opinion. There were those who carped at his idiosyncrasies, denied his power, and questioned his interpretations. Such dissent, however, merely fired his supporters with greater zeal.³¹

The teenage Sickert became one of the most zealous of his defenders.* He attended the Lyceum with a passionate commitment and found himself drawn into the orbit of fellow enthusiasts. Despite his comparative youth he was taken up by a group of students from the Slade, the art school attached to University College in Gower Street. They would attend Lyceum first nights en bloc and then crowd outside the stage door to cheer Irving to his carriage at the end of the evening. To be part of this excited band was an intoxicating taste of freedom and community.³²

The gatherings were known as ‘rabbles’, and they were mythologized even as they were enjoyed. Arthur Kennedy, one of the leaders of the group, recorded their exploits in mock heroic verse. Their attendance of a performance of Richard III was celebrated by a parody of William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, beginning,

The master of masters is Irving, and his lofty roof-trees stand

In glory of gold and marble, by the river’s golden Strand.

They are high, well-built and glorious, and many doors have they,

But one door is low-browed and mystic and dim and cloudy and grey,

And over its darkling throat, on the very lintel is writ

In letters of fire of magic, the name of the Mouth of the Pit.…

A goodly company are they of damsels and lofty men

And ten are high-born maidens, and fearless knights are ten.

And there on the steps of the threshold they range in a two fold ring,

Round a radiant lady, their leader, whose name is a month in spring.

The ‘radiant lady’ reference was to Margery May, a Slade scholar (and the future Lady Horne), who was the most impassioned devotee. Amongst the listed assembly of ‘fearless knights’ Sickert was designated as ‘a scholar, well-taught in many a thing,/Who journeyed north to join them, from the College of the King’.³³ By this band, Irving was accounted a deity. When the Sickerts’ down-to-earth cook poured cold water on their ‘Irving delirium’ by remarking, ‘After all, Irving’s only a man when all’s said and done’, it came – Walter recalled – ‘as a shock to Margery May, and certainly to me’.³⁴

In imitation of Irving, Sickert began mounting his own Shakespearean productions in the holidays. He named his troupe the Hypocrites, or ‘Hyps’. During the summer of 1877, while staying at Newquay, he dragooned his siblings and friends into performing a cut-down version of Macbeth. It was a radical open-air production staged in an old quarry. The dramatic effect of the setting, however, was slightly undermined when Walter (in the title role) turned his ankle while making his first entrance down the steep scree – and completed the descent upon his bottom, to the ill-suppressed amusement of the three witches.³⁵ It was not the sort of thing that happened to Irving – and Irving was Walter’s model. He developed an arresting impersonation of the great man’s style. At the school prize day that Christmas he caused what the headmaster described as a ‘sensation’ with his rendition of a speech from Richard III in the manner of Irving.³⁶ It was a performance that raised Sickert to a new prominence within the school, eclipsing even his coincidental triumph in the Vice-Master’s German Prize.*

Sickert’s friendship with the Slade rabble-rousers forged an important connection in his mind between art and the theatre. Years later he recalled the benefits of this nexus, and urged the ‘stage’ to draw, once more, closer to the ‘brush’. (He suggested that the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells should offer free seats in the gallery to all art students.) ‘Actors’, as he noted, ‘know there is no propaganda like the enthusiasm of young students’; while the stage offered young painters not only an education in English literature but also a potential subject. Even as a teenager, it seems, Sickert recognized the possibility of making pictures ‘drawn from the theatre’.³⁷

In the short term, his friendship with the band of stage-struck art students served to open up the London art world for him, bringing him into contact with the more vital currents of contemporary painting. Inspired, as he later admitted, in part by ‘intellectual snobbishness’ and ‘the “urge” to compete in agreeing with ladies a little older’ than himself, he began to look beyond the simple pleasures of ‘the narrative picture’ and to fidget after ‘novelty’.³⁸

Artistic novelty was in rather short supply in the London of the late 1870s. The great masters of the previous age, Constable and Turner, were dead, and their heirs were not apparent. The Royal Academy had become stultified by its own commercial success, and had dragged most of the other chartered art institutions along with it. The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – who had promised to reinvigorate art in the 1850s – had gone their separate ways. Rossetti had retreated into seclusion, and no longer exhibited. Holman Hunt stood aloof. Millais had embraced the world, acceding to the Royal Academy, social success, and a highly profitable career as a portrait painter. He was the self-assumed ‘head of the profession’, and he held that the baronetcy he had received was no more than a proper ‘encouragement to the pursuit of art in its highest and noblest form’. He lived in a mansion in Palace Gate, and Sickert would sometimes see him sitting with a friend on a bench in Kensington Gardens, ‘a touching and majestical presence’, resembling more ‘an angelic and blustering personification of John Bull’ than a painter.³⁹ The vast majority of British artists subscribed only too gladly – as one critic has said – to John Wilkie’s ‘cynical formula that “to know the taste of the public, to learn what will best please the employer, is to the artist the most valuable of knowledge”’. And what the paying public wanted was anecdote, sentiment, moral tone, and workmanship. To a society that saw virtue in labour, ‘high finish’ was regarded as the one necessary technical requirement. The other – even more important – criterion was subject matter: it had to be either sentimental or edifying, and – if possible – both. The Baby was the dominant motif of most British exhibitions at this period.⁴⁰

And yet within the tradition there were some signs of flickering life. George Frederick Watts, though he claimed that his pictures ‘were not paintings but sermons’, was producing works of undeniable force and achievement. There was vitality, too, in both the idealized classicism of Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter, and Albert Moore, and the romanticized realism of a second generation of Pre-Raphaelites – the heirs of Rossetti – led by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

Arthur Kennedy took Sickert and other Slade friends to Burne-Jones’s house in the North End Road, West Kensington. There they were allowed to look over the artist’s studio and inspect his pictures of gracefully androgynous beings with retroussé noses looking pale and interesting amongst garlands of improbably detailed flora. Sickert was impressed, but grudgingly so. He recognized Burne-Jones as a ‘brilliant draughtsman’ but remained only half-attracted – and half repelled – by his paintings. The realm of ‘strange and exquisite fancy’ that the artist had created, though undeniably powerful, was impossibly alien to Sickert, who possessed almost no sense of ‘fancy’, exquisite or otherwise.⁴¹ Nevertheless, despite his artistic reservations he found himself connected – albeit loosely – to this ardent Pre-Raphaelite world. His sister, Helena, now fourteen, was attending Notting Hill High School and had become friendly both with Burne-Jones’s daughter, Margaret, and William Morris’s two girls, Jenny and Mary (known as ‘Jennyanmay’). They often spent their weekends at each other’s houses; Helena would borrow copies of Morris’s beautifully produced Kelmscott books and bring them home. Both Morris and Burne-Jones called on the Sickerts, while Morris’s disciple, William de Morgan, was already known to the family through his connection with the Sheepshanks.⁴²

Sickert encountered Burne-Jones’s work again later in that summer of 1877 at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street. It was the art event of the year. The Grosvenor was a new phenomenon. There had been commercial galleries before, but none conceived on such a scale, nor carried off with such taste. Established by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, it was to be a veritable ‘Temple of Art’, offering the discerning public the chance to see the most up-to-date work in surroundings that suggested an idealized drawing room, or ‘some old Venetian palace’, rather than an overcrowded auction house.⁴³ Burne-Jones was the star of the show, represented by, amongst other major works, The Seven Days of Creation, The Mirror of Venus, and The Beguiling of Merlin. There were pictures by his followers and rivals, minutely detailed, richly coloured representations of myth and legend. One wall glowed with the brooding metaphorical figure-paintings of G. F. Watts, another with the serene, soft-tinted classical beauties of Albert Moore. But it was not these that excited the 17-year-old Sickert. His attention was arrested by three tall canvases hung to the left of the door in the ‘large gallery’. All were interesting, and one was particularly well calculated to appeal: a portrait of Henry Irving as Phillip II of Spain. They were the work of the American-born, Paris-trained artist, James McNeill Whistler.

Sickert, by his own rather heightened account, experienced an artistic epiphany:

To a few, a very few, these and the other [five] canvases by Whistler [on view] came as a revelation, a thing of absolute conviction, admitting of no doubt or hesitation. Here was the finger of God. The rest became mere paint. Excellent, meritorious, worthy, some of it was, but it was mere paint and canvas. Here a thin girl, now in white muslin with black bows, now in a fur jacket and hat, breathed into being without any means being apparent. She stood, startled, in those narrow frames, and stared at you, with white face and red lips, out of nowhere whence she had emerged. There was a blue sea and a sandy shore, with a man in a light grey coat – Courbet, as I afterwards learnt. There was a snow scene in London in a fog, with a draggled little figure shuffling towards a lighted window. No one who was not there can imagine the revelation which these canvases were at that time.⁴⁴

To most observers the revelation was an unwelcome one. To Millais and W. P. Frith, Whistler was a ‘a sort of Gorgon’s head’, while a critical establishment that set store by subject matter, sentiment, fine detail, and high finish, found his muted, ‘impressionistic’, often subjectless pictures all but incomprehensible.⁴⁵ Their titles – which borrowed from the vocabulary of music: ‘Nocturne’, ‘Symphony’, ‘Arrangement’ – were an affront to sense. The pictures might be ‘clever’; indeed – according to Millais – they were ‘a damned sight too clever!’ They were certainly alien, and probably dangerous. And like most ingenious alien dangers, they seemed to have their origins in modern France. Whistler, it was acknowledged, was a practitioner of something called ‘Impressionism’, although just what ‘Impressionism’ might be, most critics thought it safest not to enquire too closely: it was enough to know that it came from France and that Whistler was its sole advocate in England. He was also an advocate who demanded a hearing.

Whistler, at forty-three, was already a conspicuous figure. His distinct and dandified appearance – unruly black locks set off by a shock of white hair, Mephistophelean moustache, monocle, wasp-waisted coat, short cane, top hat and Yankee swagger – was fixed by the caricaturists. His astringent comments and sharp witticisms were reported, not infrequently by himself, in the press. His Sunday ‘breakfast’ parties, which lasted most of the afternoon, were notorious. His views on art, interior decoration, oriental porcelain, and gallery design were proclaimed with a self-assurance that often crossed the borders of arrogance. These were things not likely to put off an admiring teenager. Whistler was set up beside Keene and Irving in Sickert’s select personal pantheon.

He was a deity in need of adherents. If the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition had a profound effect on Sickert’s life, it had an even deeper one on Whistler’s. Amongst the pictures he exhibited was one – not much remarked by Sickert – called Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a small canvas of dark blue-blacks scattered – if not spattered – with points of brightness: the image of a firework display. This was the painting that so enraged Ruskin, the ageing arbiter of Victorian artistic taste: the pot of paint flung in the public’s face, for which Whistler had the ‘cockney impudence’ to be asking two hundred guineas. Whistler responded to Ruskin’s intemperate critique with a writ of libel.⁴⁶

The action drew a battle line through the British art world. Neutrality was all but impossible. Those who were not with Whistler were against him. And most people were against him. The feelings of bafflement, irritation, and scorn that Whistler’s art already engendered in the mind of the gallery-going public became intensified and took on a personal edge as the legal process advanced during 1878. When the case was heard in November, Burne-Jones and W. P. Frith both appeared against Whistler in the witness box; others spoke against him in the press, the studio, and the drawing room. Only a bold few rallied to his standard. Sickert, of course, was of their number. If he did not attend the trial, he followed its progress and lamented its conclusion: Whistler, with much shrillness and no little wit, won the verdict, but gained only a farthing’s damages, a huge legal bill, and the general disapprobation of the public. To Sickert, however, he remained a hero. And when, crowing over his nominal victory, Whistler published an annotated transcript of the proceedings, Sickert bought a copy.⁴⁷

Walter’s independent life amongst the unchaperoned worlds of the art school and the stage was the cause of some concern at home. Edith, the daughter of Hugh Carter, recalled that as a child she heard Mrs Sickert lamenting, ‘I don’t know what to do about Walter, he is so wayward’, after which pronouncement she (though only aged about five) would not let Walter hold her hand as he accompanied her and her brother to their kindergarten on his own way to school. ‘No,’ she informed him with the moral assurance of the young. ‘You worry your mother.’⁴⁸ The main worry was Walter’s interest in girls. He had developed a crush on Edith Carter’s mother, Maria, who was barely thirty and very beautiful. Indeed he described her as his ‘first love’. And other less exalted loves seem to have followed soon after. Edith remembered one morning, while playing in the Sickerts’ garden, seeing Walter – still in his evening clothes – sneak into the house ‘by the back alley, in the most extraordinary way’. (She was told not to make any remarks about it.)⁴⁹

It was clear that Walter had begun to strain the bounds of both home and school life. At King’s College School he had certainly gained that intellectual ‘confidence’ from ‘knowing a little about something’ which he came to regard as the goal of good schooling. At the beginning of 1878, Dr Maclear wrote to Professor Reginald Poole at the British Museum, recommending Walter for a possible post in the Coins and Medals department.⁵⁰ Mrs Sickert was very grateful for this initiative. There was a tone of real relief in her letter of thanks to Maclear for his good offices: ‘I assure you that we are very grateful to you for your kindness in helping [Walter] to what we believe to be most congenial work. We sincerely believe that [he] will show himself to be worthy of your good opinion and hope that you will continue to feel a kindly interest in him.’⁵¹ A job would have the double benefit of occupying Walter’s energies and relieving the Sickerts’ domestic finances.

Anne Sheepshanks, the family’s guardian angel, had died two years previously – in February 1876 – and while Mrs Sickert’s allowance was continued it was not increased. (After various bequests to Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Royal Astronomical Society, the bulk of Anne Sheepshanks’ estate had been left in trust for the support of her last surviving sibling, the recently widowed Susanna Levett.⁵²) Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1878 the Sickerts moved from their home in Notting Hill across to the other side of Hyde Park, to 12 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington. The new house – a three-storey semi-detached villa with an ‘extra wing’ – was bigger, if only slightly, than Hanover Terrace. Built just fifteen years before, with an eye to suggesting, rather than providing, a modest grandeur, the rooms were all too high for their width, and the staircases too narrow to allow two people to pass. The rent – at £90 a year – marked an increase in the family expenses, and must have made the prospect of Walter entering paid employment additionally attractive.⁵³

But it was not to be. Professor Poole was after a pure classicist rather than an all-round linguist. He was impressed by Sickert, however, and offered to assist him if he wished to reapply for another post at a later date.⁵⁴ Walter returned to school at the start of 1878 and ‘settled down to work in the matriculation class’.⁵⁵ He enjoyed the challenge of exams and, concentrating his energies, passed with First Class honours.⁵⁶

His academic achievements were such that they might perhaps have been expected to lead on to university – his friend Alfred Pollard had already gone up to Oxford with a scholarship.⁵⁷ But the expense of a university education was beyond the Sickert budget.⁵⁸ Walter, it was recognized, must get a job. Initially, when consulted by his father – during one of their walks together on Wormwood Scrubs – as to his hopes for the future, he had suggested rather unhelpfully that he intended to be ‘An Universalgenie’ (he had been reading a life of Goethe).⁵⁹ Universal geniuses, however, were not a commodity in the employment market. Besides, Walter’s own views came into sharper focus during his last year of schooling. He was, his sister recalled, ‘in no doubt that his vocation lay in painting’.⁶⁰

This was the last thing that his parents wanted to hear. Oswald Sickert had dedicated his life to art and was keenly aware that he had not made his living from it. Although the evidence of great artistic fortunes was everywhere to hand – visible in the huge studio-palaces of Melbury Road, Holland Park – such riches were beyond his reach. And they were receding further. The high watermark of Victorian prosperity was already passing. Painting was an overcrowded profession, and Oswald Sickert was being crowded out. He had come to regard himself as a failure.⁶¹ It was the Sheepshanks’ allowance rather than the meagre returns from any sales he might make that paid the household bills. And the Sheepshanks’ resources were finite: they could not stretch to provide Walter with the sort of prolonged and dedicated training that Oswald had enjoyed at Munich and Paris. Besides, although he had ‘a great opinion of Walter’s abilities in general’, neither he nor Mrs Sickert believed that they were ‘specialised in painting’.⁶² He did everything possible to discourage his son from following him in what he described as his ‘chien de métier’.⁶³

In the face of such opposition, Walter made some efforts in alternative directions. He considered applying for the higher division of the Home Civil Service. But this, he discovered, would require three years’ coaching, which would be just as expensive as university.⁶⁴ He wrote to Professor Poole, asking if places at the British Museum Library might ‘be got separately from [such] general Examinations … and if you think there would be any chance for me’.⁶⁵ The answer did not encourage him to pursue this course. His father urged him towards any career where he would be sure of earning a living.⁶⁶ The law was suggested, and given serious consideration⁶⁷ – although this, too, unless begun in a lowly clerical capacity, would have required some expensive training.

Beyond these conventional options a more tempting vista beckoned. The stage. Extraordinarily, the idea was not thrown out of court. But then, compared to Oswald Sickert’s ‘dog of a profession’, acting had various attractions. It was not a calling that the Sickerts knew to be unremunerative – even if this was only because they knew very little about it at all. It was no longer socially beyond the pale, at least not in the artistic circles frequented by the Sickerts; and, unlike almost all other professions, it required no formal and expensive training, and no fees of entry.

They were encouraged, too, by the example of their friends the Forbes-Robertsons. John Forbes-Robertson, a prolific art journalist and lecturer, lived with his wife and five children in a large house in Charlotte Street, just off Bedford Square.⁶⁸ His eldest son, Johnston, although having begun an art training at the RA schools, had been obliged ‘by force of circumstances’ to give it up and seek a more immediately rewarding career.⁶⁹ He had found it on the stage. A family friend had got him a small part in a play at the Princess Theatre. And from that beginning he had managed to make his own way as an actor. He had performed in Samuel Phelps’s company, acted with Ellen Terry on her triumphant return to the London stage, and was steadily in work.⁷⁰ His younger brother, Ian, was just about to embark upon the same path.⁷¹ Here were models for emulation. And if the stage offered little security, it was at least susceptible to energy and talent, and Walter – it seemed – had both.

He rounded off his school career, at the end-of-year Prize Day, by giving a stirring performance as Cardinal Wolsey in a selection of scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.⁷² To his proud parents, appreciative teachers, and admiring peers, it must have seemed only too likely that he would succeed on his chosen path.

* The ‘Modern Division’ offered a less rigorously academic approach, with vocational courses in book-keeping and map drawing.

* This of course may be because the picture (now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), though found in Sickert’s studio at his death, was not by his hand.

* In 1877, Samuel Phelps, his previous thespian hero, had died at the age of seventy-four. Sickert walked to Highgate for his funeral (RE, 24).

* Sickert’s dramatic experiments did occasionally look beyond the example of Irving. Once, he dressed up as a maid and called on the Carters, pretending to be in search of a situation. He took in the whole family until Mrs Carter’s parting shot – ‘You know I don’t allow any followers’ – induced him to break into ‘an irresistible smile which gave the show away’ (Edith Ortmans, née Carter, TS, Sutton/GUL).

CHAPTER TWO Apprentice or Student?

I THE UTILITY PLAYER

I wonder all the managers in London are not after him.

(Maggie Cobden to Dorothy Richmond)

Sickert’s stage career got off to a false start. At the beginning of the New Year of 1879 he collapsed with a bad case of flu and was laid up for almost a fortnight. Although, as he wrote to his friend Pollard, he might have been able to ‘excel in all dying scenes, old men & anything feeble’, his availability was unknown. Instead he was obliged to channel his returning energies into schemes of his own. The days of his convalescence were spent – when not ‘feebly pottering about the neighbourhood with a stick’ – in devising plays. After toying with, and discarding, several ideas he decided to dramatize a novel by the German, G. F. Richter, and then mount a drawing-room production of it. Progress, however, was slow.¹

He hoped, on his recovery, to see Mrs Bateman, who had recently taken on the management of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre; but the main focus of his ambition was fixed, unsurprisingly, upon the Lyceum.² Irving was now in sole charge of the theatre, opening his first production on the penultimate day of the old year, to the rapturous acclaim of his supporters. He had engaged, as his leading lady, Ellen Terry, and in her he found a perfect foil for his own greatness. Her acting was considered to have an unmatched candour, and an emotional depth that owed something to the vicissitudes of her early life.

She came of theatrical stock. The daughter of actors, four of her ten siblings were also on the stage. In 1864, at the age of sixteen, she had given up a successful career as a child star and contracted an ill-advised marriage with the already middle-aged and finicky painter, G. F. Watts. He had been captivated by her distinctive grace, and spent much of their short period together recording it in drawings and paintings. The rest of the time he spent in repenting of his decision to marry. He had hoped, as he put it, ‘to remove an impulsive girl from the dangers and temptations of the stage’, but he soon discovered that the stage could not be so easily removed from the girl. His new wife could create more than enough drama in a domestic setting. After barely a year, they separated.³ Ellen returned briefly to her family, before eloping with the mercurial architect and stage-designer E. W. Godwin. For five years they lived together happily in Hertfordshire, in sin and ever-increasing debt. Ellen bore two illegitimate children, Edith and Edward, before she was lured back to the theatre in 1874.* Her relationship with Godwin did not long survive her return, but in 1877, after finally receiving a divorce from Watts, she married the actor Charles Wardle (who performed under the stage name Charles Kelly), and achieved the haven of stability. At the time of her arrival at the Lyceum she was thirty-one and considered by discerning judges ‘the most beautiful woman of her times’ – even if it remained a mystery just how she achieved this with her pale eyes, long tip-tilted nose, broad mouth, and ‘tow-like’ hair.⁴ Her presence at the Lyceum added a new lustre to the place. The adulation that had previously been fixed upon Irving alone became fixed upon her as well. She was one half of a twin-headed deity. And she was another reason for Sickert wishing to join the Lyceum company.

At the beginning of March he reported excitedly that he was hoping for ‘something’ at the theatre. To prepare himself he went every night ‘to observe’.⁵ He also took up fencing lessons to improve his posture and fit himself for the swash and buckle of the high Victorian repertoire.⁶ Through a family friend he was introduced to Irving and put into contact with the person responsible for hiring the company’s ‘supers’ – the non-speaking extras needed for crowd scenes, stage battles, and general ‘business’.⁷ The Lyceum employed dozens, if not hundreds, of them. Most were mere drudges, ‘small wage earners’ adding to their income by taking on an evening job. But there was a select band of enthusiasts, known in the theatre as ‘Lyceum young men’ – ambitious trainees starting out on their theatrical careers. Sickert joined their ranks. The ‘Lyceum young men’ enjoyed certain small privileges. If any part required some modicum of intelligence or flair – or perhaps even included a line – it was given to one to them. They even had their own green room.⁸ It is not known in which production Sickert first ‘walked on’; but by the end of the month he was able to get tickets for Alfred Pollard and his sisters to attend the first night of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons.⁹ For Sickert, at the age of nineteen, to be on stage with Irving and Terry was to savour the full glamour of the theatrical world.¹⁰

Despite his lowly status he was acknowledged by Irving and treated with kindly consideration.¹¹ He also came to know Ellen Terry. She lived in Longridge Road, close to the Sickerts’ Kensington home, and sent her two children to the same advanced primary school attended by young Oswald and Leonard.¹² Walter developed a crush on her which she graciously indulged. In one letter to Pollard he boasted that he had spent an evening in her company, remarking complacently that friends had begun to suspect that there was some ‘MissTerry’ about his movements.¹³ On another occasion, after he had taken Helena to a musical soirée at a friend’s house, he made an impromptu call at Longridge Road on the way home, much to his sister’s delight and alarm.¹⁴

It was perhaps through Ellen Terry that Walter was introduced to E. W. Godwin. Despite their separation, he and Ellen had remained on close terms: he continued to design costumes for her, and to offer advice upon her acting.* Godwin called at Pembroke Gardens early in the year, and soon afterwards invited Walter to dine with him and his young wife – the painter Beatrice Birnie Philip – at their elegantly underfurnished home in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury, where the white and strawcoloured drawing room was dominated by a life-size cast of the Venus de Milo.¹⁵ Although he continued to carry out occasional architectural commissions, Godwin had become increasingly absorbed in his stage work, designing, with a devoted regard for the details of historical accuracy, sets, costumes, and properties. (When asked to make designs for Wilson Barrett’s production of Hamlet, his first step had been to visit Elsinore.) He had many theatrical friends and connections, and was potentially a very useful contact for an aspiring young actor.

For Walter, however, he had an additional attraction. He was a close friend of Whistler. Sickert’s commitment to a career on the stage had done nothing to diminish his passionate interest in the American painter. At the Grosvenor Gallery show that spring, the picture that impressed him most was Whistler’s Golden Girl.¹⁶ Godwin could tell him more about his hero. He, after all, had designed Whistler’s home, the elegant and austere White House in Tite Street, Chelsea, along with much of its furniture. The two men had collaborated on projects: they had created an exhibition stand together for the Paris Exposition Universelle the previous year. They shared a common passion for Japanese art and blue-and-white china. They were both members of the St Stephen’s Club and saw much of each other there.

If Sickert’s connection with Godwin brought him closer to Whistler’s world, it did not quite bring him into Whistler’s presence. It was Ellen Terry who, according to legend, was responsible for first drawing Sickert to his hero’s attention. It happened one evening at the Lyceum when Walter was not on duty. Wishing to throw a bunch of violets to Ellen at the curtain call, and anxious that it should carry over the footlights, he weighted his bouquet with lead shot. He rather overestimated the amount needed, and the flowers, after spinning through the air, dropped to the stage with a very audible clunk right next to the greatly surprised Henry Irving. Whistler, who was in the house that night, noted this miniature drama with amusement and took the trouble to discover its perpetrator.¹⁷

The two men met soon afterward. From the beginning of May the Forbes-Robertsons hosted a soirée each Friday at their house in Charlotte Street.¹⁸ They were exciting and crowded occasions: Mr Forbes-Robertson had a wide connection, and his offspring were numerous, talented, successful, charming, and gregarious. At their parties the worlds of art, letters, and the stage met and the generations mingled. Walter could encounter young actresses and old lions.¹⁹ Oscar Wilde, just down from Oxford and embarked upon a career of self-advertisement and poetical affectation, was a regular guest. So was Whistler. It was almost certainly in the crowded studio at Charlotte Street that Sickert was first introduced to his hero.²⁰ The meeting, however, though momentous, was brief, and it was only on the following day, when Sickert by chance saw Whistler entering a tobacconist’s shop and followed him in, that he asked if he might call at his studio.²¹

Whistler, though he consented, barely had a studio in which to receive his young admirer. Overwhelmed by legal bills after his pyrrhic victory in the Ruskin trial, he had been declared bankrupt at the beginning of May.²² His collections of oriental china and Japanese prints had been sold off at auction along with many of his own works. The bailiffs were in possession of the White House, and bills were already posted announcing its imminent sale. Dispirited but not crushed by these setbacks, Whistler continued to live on in the denuded house, and to keep up a front of spirited defiance. A semblance of the old life continued. It was said that he pressed the bemused bailiffs into service at his Sunday breakfast parties. He found both the time and the heart to show Sickert over his studio. Although much had been sold, and not a little destroyed (to prevent it falling into the hands of his creditors), there was still plenty to admire.

Sickert wrote enthusiastically to Pollard: ‘I went to see Whistler the other day. He showed me some glorious work of his and it was of course a great pleasure to me to talk with him about painting. Such a man! The only painter alive who has first immense genius, then conscientious persistent work striving after his ideal[,] he knowing exactly what he is about and turned aside by no indifference or ridicule.’²³ The account betrayed a depth of engagement that went beyond Sickert’s more conventional excitement at the deeds of Irving and Terry.

The tension between his theatrical ambitions and his artistic interests was quickened that summer. In August, when most of the London theatres closed, Walter accompanied the rest of the family to Dieppe. They had rented the Maison Bellevue, Miss Slee’s old school house on the heights of Neuville, for the holidays. The school had finally closed, but Miss Slee herself was still in residence. She was not the only addition to the Sickert party that summer. Various other friends came to stay, and Oscar Wilde accepted an invitation from Mrs Sickert to spend some time with them. Walter was initially suspicious of Wilde, considering him something of a poseur; but he was willing to suspend his verdict because, as he explained to Pollard, ‘firstly E[llen] T[erry] likes him and 2ndly he likes me’.²⁴ Extended exposure encouraged him in this revised opinion. Wilde, beneath the deliberate extravagances of his manner, had real charm. Besides winning over the sceptical Walter, he was a source of delight to the rest of the family. His laughter was ceaseless and contagious. He played happily with Oswald and Leo, and made a special bond with Helena, then a bright but rather bolshy 15-year-old. He would discuss poetry with her, despite her determination to go to Cambridge – the Scientific University. When he caught her frowning doubtfully at the improbable tales he invented for Oswald and Leo’s amusement, he would appeal to her in a tone of mock anguish, ‘You don’t believe me, Miss Nelly. I assure you … well, it’s as good as true.’²⁵

One afternoon he read – or chanted – his Newdigate Prize poem, ‘Ravenna’, to the assembled company as they sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard:

A year ago I breathed the Italian air

And yet methinks this Northern spring is fair …

It was a mellifluous performance, punctuated only by Miss Slee’s schoolmarmish insistence on correcting some minor point of pronunciation, an interruption that Wilde took with good humour.²⁶ Sadly, he was not on hand to help Walter write a comic playlet for the company to act: Walter could have done with the assistance (he felt ‘totally devoid of fancy & originality’ in the field of comic writing) and Wilde might have discovered his true vocation earlier.²⁷

Another visitor was Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was on a walking holiday. His theatrical career was advancing swiftly. He had just been engaged by Irving for the forthcoming season at the Lyceum.²⁸ Although he complained to Helena that he was usually cast in character parts – often as old men – even his geriatric disguises could not quite obliterate his broad-browed, straight-nosed good looks, nor muffle his perfect diction (learnt, so he claimed, from Phelps). At the age of twenty-six, he was beginning to gain the status of a stage idol. And yet he still managed to combine this achievement with his first love: painting. He continued to work on portraits – often of theatrical figures – in the studio at Charlotte Street.²⁹

To Sickert, Forbes-Robertson’s life must have seemed both charmed and desirable: rather than having to decide between painting and acting, he had chosen both. Might he himself not follow suit, and become a star of the London stage and an acknowledged artist? For the moment, however, both goals remained frustratingly out of reach. And the vision paralysed almost more than it inspired him. He lapsed, as he told Pollard, in to ‘such despair about [himself]’ that he was unable to work. ‘As to painting,’ he confessed, ‘I have done nothing.’ He spent most of his time lying in the orchard reading Thackeray: Vanity Fair he pronounced ‘very perfect’.³⁰

Nevertheless he returned to London with a sense of gathering resolve. Although he was still ‘appearing’ rather than ‘acting’ at the Lyceum, he sought to speed up the pace of his progress by mounting some drawing-room theatricals of his own. Together with his friend Justin Huntly M’Carthy (son of Justin M’Carthy MP) he put on a series of performances at the M’Carthys’ house in Gower Street. They acted scenes from Love’s Labour’s Lost (Sickert taking the part of the curate, Sir Nathaniel) together with the Irving staple, Raising the Wind (with Sickert in the Irving role of Jeremy Diddler), and L’Avocat Patelin (in which Sickert reprised his successful KCS performance). Walter devised elaborate make-ups and costumes for his various parts. He was so pleased with his get-up as Sir Nathaniel that he arranged to have himself photographed in costume. Walter marshalled his brothers Robert and Bernhard into minor parts but the productions were clearly intended as a showcase for his talents and as such they were not unsuccessful. Despite, as he put it, getting ‘lost a little’ during one of his Shakespearean speeches, he ‘muddled through somehow’ and no one noticed. Mr Kelly (perhaps Ellen Terry’s husband) promised him a part in a matinée he was putting on at the Gaiety, and also recommended him to ‘a very good agency’.³¹

In December, Sickert returned to King’s College School to give a performance of Clarence’s Dream from Richard III at the annual prize-giving. The school magazine – edited by his friend Alfred Kalisch – described the recitation as ‘one of the features of the day’: ‘Sickert surpassed himself, and evoked the greatest burst of applause heard during the evening. The only fault of the performance was its shortness. Sickert’s elocution was perfect, distinct without a trace of effort, and his gestures, though few, were most expressive.’ The notice ended with the hope that ‘he may meet with similar success in his professional career’.³²

Perhaps on account of this success or by the efforts of his ‘very good agency’ – but most probably through the good offices of E. W. Godwin – Sickert was engaged almost immediately afterwards as a ‘super’ by George Rignold.³³ Rignold (a close friend of Godwin’s) was mounting a production of Douglas Jerrold’s once-popular naval drama, Black-Eyed Susan, at the Connaught Theatre in Holborn.³⁴ According to Sickert’s own account, this was his first real break. There was a difficulty in finding among the supers someone who could speak convincingly as the foreman of the jury in the court-martial scene. Sickert, it was considered, would make the most plausible ‘naval officer’, so he got the part.³⁵ By January he had been promoted to ‘first servant’;³⁶ and in February he achieved the distinction of his first proper speaking role as ‘Jasper’ in the English Civil War romance Amos Clark. E. W. Godwin and Beatrice were amongst the friends in the audience to witness this debut.³⁷ It was not a large part. He had only one cue: ‘That man Jasper creeping among the laurels’, at which he made his appearance. The character – as might be guessed from his name and entry line – was a villain. One day, on mentioning to a family friend what part he was playing, Sickert was warned, ‘Take care, don’t let it affect your real character, Walter!’ There was little danger of that. Although he enjoyed piecing together his performances from the external incidents of costume, make-up, and gesture, he seems not to have lost himself in the characters he portrayed, nor in their situations. He never even bothered to read the whole of Amos Clark.³⁸

In tandem with these small theatrical advances, Sickert continued to foster his artistic ambitions.* One interesting avenue, however, was closed off to him. He returned from his holidays to find that Whistler had left England. The painter, bankrupt and homeless, was in Venice, having decamped with his mistress, Maud Franklin, and a commission from the Fine Art Society for a series of etchings. In the absence of his hero, Sickert turned for direction to his father, and Oswald Sickert, satisfied that his son was now making progress on the professional stage (and conscious perhaps that a double career might be possible), was happy to offer him every practical assistance. Walter gained his first semi-formal art instruction by working alongside his father at Pembroke Gardens. There would sometimes be life drawing in the mornings, and Oswald painted a portrait of his eldest son, which must have been instructive for the sitter.³⁹ Walter also worked from the model at Otto Scholderer’s studio in Putney.⁴⁰

Sickert always claimed that this early instruction he received from his father and Scholderer provided the sound and necessary basis for his whole development as an artist. He certainly picked up good habits from them. He learnt to look, and to set down what he saw – not what he thought he saw. He recalled how Scholderer would chide those who substituted ‘the vapid head of convention’ for what was actually before them, with the remark, ‘Der Gypskopf steckt noch drin’ (The plaster cast is still inside it).⁴¹ But besides such particular lessons he also gained something more general: a first understanding of, and connection with, the great tradition of ‘the French school’.⁴²

The tradition that the two men had imbibed in Paris in the 1850s was a distinctive one. It rested upon the conception that painting was divided into three elements: line, tone (the range of light and darkness), and colour. Following the traditional method, as taught at Couture’s studio, these three elements were still applied in three separate operations: an elegant outline drawing was first made on the prepared canvas. To this were added a few simple tonal ‘values’ in a ‘frotté of thin colour’, which was left overnight to dry. Another thin layer of lights and shadows could then be added in portions. In the next stage, a transparent coloured glaze of oil paint was laid over this underpainting with ‘long haired whipping brushes’ in a single process.⁴³ By the time Oswald Sickert and Scholderer had got to Paris this classical arrangement was already being challenged. The development of ready-made conveniently transported oil paints had encouraged artists such as Courbet to experiment with the medium – to lay the oil paint on more thickly, to treat it as opaque rather than transparent. This effected a radical change in practice. Colour and tone were applied in a single operation (the colours being mixed to the right ‘value’ of tone on the palette), and line became a subordinate element.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, the essential conception of the tripartite division remained as the basis against which these changes were made. And it was a conception that Sickert imbibed from his first teachers. It provided him with the essential framework for his future thoughts about painting, and for their future development.⁴⁵

Sickert’s friendship with Justin Huntly M’Carthy brought him into contact with the whole secular, literary, intellectual, and politically committed world of Gower Street. The long, sober-fronted thoroughfare, taking its lead from the ‘godless’ institution of University College that stood at its head, exhaled a bracing aura of high-minded enquiry. Its hospitable drawing rooms hummed not only with amateur theatricals, but also with political discussions and intellectual debates. It could not be forgotten that Charles Darwin had written part of On the Origin of Species at one end of the street, or that the Italian political exile Giuseppe Mazzini had found a refuge at the other. At the M’Carthys’, the dominant topic was Ireland. Justin M’Carthy Senior, born in Cork and having come to maturity during the worst years of the Irish famine, was a fervent believer in the need for Irish Home Rule. His successes as a journalist, novelist and popular historian had both supported and furthered a political career, and in 1879 he was elected as an Irish MP for Parnell’s new Irish nationalist party.⁴⁶ At the home of Mr and Mrs George Robinson, the subject matter was likely to be both classical and literary, and to be led by the Robinsons’ two conspicuously brilliant blue-stocking daughters, Mary and Mabel.⁴⁷ Benjamin Leigh-Smith’s household – at number 54 – was a beacon for women’s rights; his sister, the watercolourist Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon, was one of the first benefactors of Girton College, Cambridge, and founder of the Society of Female Artists.⁴⁸

Also staying in Gower Street in 1879 was the New Zealand politician and landscape painter John Crowe Richmond, together with his family. He was over in London not least so that his younger daughter, Dorothy, could gain a good art education. ‘Dolla’ Richmond, as she was known, had started attending the Slade, and was already achieving a reputation there – amongst the tutors as an artist, and amongst her fellows as both a beauty and a devotee of Henry Irving.⁴⁹ On these two latter fronts she was thought to rival even the lovely Margery May. Sickert, when they met, was very much attracted to her, and they began a bantering, flirtatious friendship. But then it was a period for bantering flirtatious friendships, and Sickert’s was not exclusive.

His attention was drawn, too, by the Cobden sisters, who were friends of the Richmonds, the Leigh-Smiths, the Robinsons, and several other Gower Street worthies.⁵⁰ Ellen, Jane, Annie, and Maggie: the four, unmarried daughters of the late Richard Cobden were something of a social phenomenon. They were young, beautiful, bright, and – in almost every sense of the word – independent.* Their father, the great apostle of Free Trade, founder of the so-called Manchester School, and scourge of the protectionist Corn Laws, had been the recipient of two large subscriptions from a grateful public during his lifetime, and at his death in 1865 he had divided up the greater part of his estate between his daughters. They were well provided for.* When, in 1877, the death of their mother had left them orphans, they had set up home together at 12 York Place, towards the northern end of Baker Street. Ellen, the eldest girl, was then 29, Jane 26, Annie 24, and Maggie – the ‘baby’ of the family by some way – just 16.

It was a cultured, vivacious household, and also a political one. The sisters remained proudly conscious of their paternal heritage and kept in close touch with their father’s old friends and allies. They espoused advanced causes with great practical energy. They were suffragettes, ‘ere ever the Suffragist movement began’;⁵¹ they believed passionately in Irish Home Rule; they supported Free Trade; and they worked to relieve the lot of the London poor. They became friendly with William Morris perhaps more on account of his radical principles than his artistic tastes. Their ardent idealism, however, did not make them solemn. They were sociable and humorous, fond of fun.

The liberal journalist (and Parnellite MP) T. P. O’Connor rated them ‘as beautiful a bevy of fair English girls’ as ever he had seen, with their ‘glowing rosy complexions, large, deep, soft, candid dark eyes’ – eyes which, he considered, held ‘something in the expression that revealed and yet half hid profound possibilities of emotion and compassion’.⁵² The term ‘bevy’ seems well chosen: there was a certain plump, partridge-like quality about them all. But, despite this point of similarity, they were never in any danger of being mistaken for each other: their colouring was in different shades, and so were their characters. Maggie was spirited and skittish with ‘a peculiar gypsy beauty’; Annie, dark, capricious, artistic, and – so her sisters thought – hard to please; Jane, with her fair hair and firm chin, was the most forthright and practical of the forthright and practical family; while the gold-tressed Ellen had perhaps the most generous spirit.⁵³ They guarded their individuality with care. It was a family rule that, except on special occasions, they did not attend events en bloc.⁵⁴

Walter, though he almost certainly met them in Gower Street, soon became a visitor at York Place. There was much for him to admire, even to envy, in the life he found there – a world free from parental controls and financial constraints. And the sisters were all so pretty, so entertaining, and so entertained by him. Already rather smitten by Dorothy Richmond, he became rather smitten by all four of the Cobden girls as well – and by their dog, Topsy. And they, for their part, were all rather smitten by their young, self-confident, handsome admirer, with his thick golden hair and irrepressible enthusiasms. Some hint of Sickert’s distinctive charm and the impact it had upon the Cobden clan is contained in Ellen’s autobiographical novel Wistons. Its hero, Robin Yaldwyn – a barely disguised portrait of Sickert – is described upon his first appearance as being ‘more wonderful and more beautiful than it’s possible to imagine’ – like ‘a spirit from some world where no one had ever been unhappy’ whose quick sympathies and charm ‘made all who came into his presence happier’.⁵⁵ He did everything, Ellen noted, in less conventionally romantic terms, ‘exquisitely, there was a fine personal stamp upon his smallest action, and he drew up his chair to the table, poured out his tea and buttered his toast in a way that gave distinction to tea and toast and table’.⁵⁶ He was, too, ‘cheerfully interested in all that personally concerned him; his morning toilette completely absorbed him; he enjoyed washing his hands, brushing his hair; it would have pleased him to dress twice for dinner. Yet with all this love of detail there was nothing fussy or finikin about him.’*⁵⁷ Ellen’s admiration for Sickert’s looks and manner was echoed by her sisters; and, bowered in such appreciative female company, Sickert was in no hurry to decide between its enticing possibilities: with generous indiscrimination he bestowed favours upon all of the Cobden girls.⁵⁸

From this enchanting world he was, however, soon dragged away. Clearly he had not disgraced himself in the role of ‘Jasper’, for Rignold engaged him as a ‘General Utility’ actor – to play five small parts – in a touring production of Henry V.59 He chose (or, perhaps, was obliged) not to appear under his own name, adopting instead the self-effacing alias, ‘Mr Nemo’. The tour opened in Birmingham at the beginning of April 1880 to good reviews and ‘crammed’ houses, before moving – with a blithe disregard for geographical convenience – to Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Bristol, Leicester, and Manchester, playing a week at each venue.⁶⁰ Rignold, who took the title role, had conceived the production on a grand Victorian scale, with elaborate period costumes and props. He made one entrance wearing full armour and mounted upon a horse. It must have been a considerable burden for the horse. Rignold, though small, was stout, and even out of armour made what Maggie Cobden described as a rather ‘solid’ king. His wife was almost equally solid; she appeared as Chorus in a white Greek dress and yellow frizzy wig.⁶¹ For the rest, the company was, according to Sickert, very much ‘in the Music Hall line’. Some of the actors had even begun their careers in the circus and did ‘tight-rope bizness’. Many of them had some difficulty in ‘getting sober by the evening’.⁶² What they made of their assured, well-connected, well-educated young Utility Player is not known, but Sickert already had a gift for making friendships across the conventional barriers of class and age.

At Birmingham, Sickert’s Lyceum companions, led by Margery May, came down from London to see him; the Cobden sisters also attended a performance.⁶³ He received baskets of roses from admirers, and the Birmingham theatre critic, C. J. Pemberton, a friend of Ellen Terry, invited him to dinner. Pemberton was encouraging about Sickert’s performance, singling out his impersonation of ‘the old man’ taken prisoner by Pistol for special praise.⁶⁴ It was Sickert’s favourite part, and he certainly made the most of it. The critic for the Liverpool Daily Post gave him a glowing review: ‘An admirable bit of acting was that of Mr Nemo as the Captive Frenchman. The spasmodic fright with which he sharply jerked his head to this side and that between his persecutor and his persecutor’s interpreter was a notable touch of nature.’⁶⁵ The terms of praise suggest that the lessons he had learned from his father and Scholderer found an echo on the stage. Good acting, like good drawing, depended upon direct observation and selection of the revealing detail: and Sickert was acquiring these skills.

He was thrilled with the review, buying up the local newsagent’s entire stock of the paper and dispatching copies to relations and friends. Ellen Terry was at the top of his list. The notice, he proclaimed with mock pomposity, had made him a ‘public’ figure. He delighted in the position, and in the absurdity of that delight. ‘My enemies’, he informed Pollard, ‘say that now I may always be seen jerking my head at all hours of the day & this is a slander.’⁶⁶ It was perhaps to fix the moment of his new-found fame that he had his photograph taken on an excursion to the Liverpudlian resort of New Brighton. Staring out from beneath the low brim of his bowler hat, his head thrown back, his jaw thrust out, he assumed a pose of mingled challenge and disdain.

The company was expected to help strike the set at the close of each week’s run, working into the early hours, dismantling flats, and packing up costumes. Nevertheless, life on tour also gave many opportunities for leisure. It was the first time Walter had been away from home since the unhappy days at his Reading prep school, and he savoured his independence. He devoted himself to learning Tennyson’s Maud (‘the most beautiful thing ever written’) on long country walks. He loafed around the Liverpool docks, taking an interest in the shipping. At Birmingham he visited a Turkish bath one afternoon. It had, though, an unsettling effect upon his constitution. He was ill all that evening and ‘in the character of the Bishop of Bourges’ threw up in his dressing room; he needed ‘raw spirits’ to ‘quiet his intestines’.⁶⁷ He probably needed raw spirits again when, at Manchester, the stage began to give way under Rignold and his horse. Rignold hastily dismounted but Sickert was left holding the animal’s bridle as it stamped its way through the boards. He leaped clear just as the poor beast crashed through the stage.⁶⁸ The incident brought the first part of the tour to a dramatic conclusion. There was to be a four-month break before the production was revived for a second set of dates.

Sickert and the rest of the company were free for the summer: free to take on other jobs. Sickert’s self-publicizing had not been in vain. One copy, at least, of the Liverpool Daily Post had found its mark. As soon as he returned to London he was engaged by Mrs Bateman to play Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Sadler’s Wells. That he felt confident to master such a large part at relatively short notice was, if nothing else, testament to his impressive (and much envied) verbal memory.⁶⁹ The production, mounted by Edward Saker, had already been given at Liverpool, Dublin, and Brighton. It was distinguished by the fact that the fairies were all played by children under the age of eleven. The conceit was perhaps more charming in the conception than in the fact. Certainly Sickert’s memory of Oberon, Titania, and their fairy throng was of clumping footsteps rattling the boards of the stage – ‘so lightly, lightly do they pass’!⁷⁰ The reviewer for Theatre magazine remained unenchanted by the spectacle, though he did allow that ‘the representatives of Lysander and Demetrius … acted fairly well’.⁷¹ Sickert appeared at Sadler’s Wells under his own name, or as nearly as the London printer would allow. In the programme his unfamiliar patronymic was rendered as ‘Sigurd’.⁷² It was a slight but perhaps telling reminder of his semi-alien origins.*

Back in London, Walter gathered up the strands of his social life. They were all plaited together on 1 July 1880, when the Sickerts hosted a dance at Pembroke Gardens.⁷³ The family enjoyed creating such occasions, reviving some of the bohemian merriment of Munich days. Preparations were elaborate. ‘I often think,’ Helena remarked, ‘that rich people can’t know the full delight of giving dances so well as poor people.’

We began to prepare about a week or two beforehand. All the furniture was turned out of the biggest room which we habitually used as a dining-room, and we crowded into the front room. The carpet was taken up and the floor re-stained and polished with beeswax and turpentine. My father did the staining, but we all helped in the polishing. For a day or two beforehand, my mother, with the help of Mary and Emily Pollard (two of our best dancers [and the sisters of Alfred Pollard]) made aspics and consommé and jellies and galantines, while on the great day itself I was pressed into service to make ‘anchovy eggs’ and coffee, and cut sandwiches till my wrist ached. Walter wrote out programmes in his exquisite handwriting and sometimes illustrated select numbers.† The doors of the three ground-floor rooms were taken off, all fenders were removed and we decorated the fireplaces and marble mantelpieces with flowers stuck in banks of moss … It was my father’s job to hang the garden with Chinese lanterns, and so elaborate was my mother’s consideration for her guests that she insisted on having all the doorways and the balcony and steps leading to the garden elaborately washed, so that the ball-dresses should not be sullied.

After the paid musicians who had been engaged for the evening had packed up, Mr Sickert happily played on at the piano till dawn for those revellers – mainly the ‘newspapermen and actors’ – who still had legs to dance.⁷⁴

Dorothy Richmond came, not in a ball dress but in a ‘white burnouse’.⁷⁵ What Ellen and Maggie Cobden wore is unrecorded, but they were both there. According to his sister’s estimate, Walter was not a particularly good dancer (Bernhard being the only brother to show any aptitude in that direction), but he was certainly energetic.⁷⁶ He flirted happily with all three girls, and probably others besides. Nevertheless, despite this generosity with his favours, it was becoming acknowledged in the Cobden-Richmond circle that Ellen Cobden was his especial favourite. And though all retained an easy and affectionate intimacy with Walter, they recognized that Ellen – or Nellie – had at least the first claim upon him.⁷⁷ It is difficult to fathom how this came about. No early letters between them exist to illumine the origins and progress of their relationship, and on the surface they were not the most obvious pairing. Ellen was twelve years his senior (Maggie Cobden and Dorothy Richmond were Sickert’s almost exact coevals). She was, however, still only thirty-two, and beautiful. Sickert in later life always described her as ‘pretty, absurdly pretty’, though he struggled to define exactly in what her prettiness lay. When pressed, he recalled her wonderful golden hair: ‘That was hair,’ he would murmur. ‘It had lights, it had lights.’⁷⁸ Other friends insisted that her eyes were her finest feature. Indeed amongst some of her circle she had the pet name ‘Matia’ – from the Greek for ‘eyes’.⁷⁹ A small pencil sketch that Sickert made of her reveals those eyes set in a fine heart-shaped face, which he imbued with both the sweetness and the melancholy of a Botticelli Madonna.⁸⁰ Even to Ellen’s contemporaries there seemed something ‘old fashioned’ about her manner and deportment, something suggestive of eighteenth-century France. She was enormously good and kind, but was not a prig. As one friend remarked, ‘like all those to whom men and women were more important than anything else she was a born gossip’;⁸¹ and behind her slightly formal exterior she could both enjoy and match Sickert’s challenge of convention. ‘[Walter] and Nellie are at present rowing on the Regent’s Park water,’ Maggie reported of one afternoon excursion. ‘It is pouring so they are doubtless enjoying themselves.’⁸²

When she left for her summer holiday in Switzerland at the beginning of August, Walter (as Maggie reported to Dolla Richmond) was depressed at the departure of his ‘polar star’. Not that the depression lasted long. He rallied enough to see Dolla off on her holiday – she was joining Maggie and Annie Cobden in Germany – and then kept all of them entertained with letters during the course of the summer.⁸³

Sickert’s own summer holiday was spent in Cornwall. He was part of a theatrical house party gathered by the Forbes-Robertsons at Cadgwith in the remote west of Cornwall close to Lizard Head. Johnston was there together with his brother Ian, his sisters Gertrude and Ida (already a widow in her twenties), and various other young friends. Adding a touch of cosmopolitan glamour to proceedings were the fiery Polish-born actress Madame Modjeska and her husband Count Bozertn Chiapowski. Modjeska, after a brilliant career in Poland, had emigrated to America in 1876, where, despite her rather shaky command of English, she achieved an immense success. It was in the hope of repeating this triumph that she had recently arrived in England. As an advertisement for her talents she had given a series of London matinée performances of Heartsease (an English adaptation of La Dame aux Camélias). Johnston Forbes-Robertson at once recognized her talent and made her welcome. She was delighted to escape the heat of London for the Cornish coast and remembered the holiday at Cadgwith as a magical time: ‘In that congenial circle one lived free from conventionalities, taking long walks on the beach or attending the lawn tennis games at the Rectory.’⁸⁴

The hospitable rector of St Ruan’s, the Revd Frederick Jackson, was an old friend of the Forbes-Robertsons.⁸⁵ Having so many theatrical celebrities suddenly on his doorstep he begged them to mount a benefit performance in aid of the church repair fund. The idea was eagerly taken up. As none of the local village halls was deemed big enough for such a gala event it was decided to give an open-air performance in the rectory garden. The local coastguards assisted in the construction of the stage: the lawn served as the auditorium, and a screen of mature trees provided the backdrop. The programme was made up of scenes from Heartsease and Romeo and Juliet (Modjeska, though almost forty, cherished an unquenchable ambition to play Shakespeare’s starcrossed lover in the land of the Bard’s birth). Johnston Forbes-Robertson took the male leads in both parts of the bill. Sickert was drafted in to play the ‘père noble’ in Heartsease, and to give himself the necessary gravitas he ordered a false beard from a London costumier. Unfortunately, it failed to arrive and he was obliged to improvise. Snipping some hairs from the tail of a white donkey, he made his own ‘Imperial’. It looked most impressive, though when, during the performance, he bent down to plant a kiss upon Modjeska’s brow at a moment of grand pathos, she almost put him off by whispering, ‘I have never been kissed by a donkey’s tail before.’⁸⁶ To the end of his life Sickert regarded Modjeska as ‘the greatest actress he had known’. Certainly she was the only star he acted opposite.⁸⁷

The holiday also had its unstaged dramas. One rain-sodden picnic at the nearby cove was enlivened when the lifeboat alarm was raised. The crew, which rapidly assembled, was short of several members, so Sickert, along with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and a couple of others, volunteered to stand in. They rowed round the headland into the next bay only to find it had been a false alarm. But Forbes-Robertson, who was sharing an oar with Sickert, could not help noticing that his friend was rather less concerned with the urgency of the moment than with ‘the wonderful effect of the white foam dashing against the mighty serpentine rocks’ off the rugged coast. Visual and artistic considerations were, it seems, never far from Sickert’s mind.⁸⁸ And in the intervals between play rehearsals and sea rescues, there must have been opportunities for painting – and being painted. It was probably at Cadgwith that he produced his little panel titled The Orchard,⁸⁹ and maybe the holiday also provided him with the opportunity to pose for Johnston Forbes-Robertson – usurping the artist’s own role of Romeo for the portrait.⁹⁰

The party broke up in the middle of August.⁹¹ Sickert had to rejoin the Rignold tour up in Yorkshire. They were performing in Bradford at the beginning of September when Madame Modjeska made her debut at the Grand Theatre, Leeds. Sickert led most of his fellow cast members over to see her. If they were impressed by her acting they were amazed by her dressing room: it was equipped with ‘Hot and Cold’ running water. For days afterwards they could ‘talk & think of nothing but this miracle’.⁹²

At the end of September the Rignold company arrived in London for a short run at the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch. Sickert was assigned lodgings in Claremont Square, at the top of the Pentonville Road. It was a first return to North London since the brief sojourn at Duncan Terrace in the 1860s. The blend of faded elegance and present grime was very different from Kensington. The tall, narrow, Georgian-brick house (just along from one in which George Cruikshank had lived) looked out not on to a central garden-square, but on to the less lovely prospect of a covered reservoir (established there by the New River Water Company). The rooms themselves, however, were pleasant, and even included a grand piano.⁹³

No sooner was he settled back in London than he presented himself at York Place. Maggie Cobden recorded his arrival in a letter to Dolla Richmond, who was on her way back to New Zealand with her family. ‘The subject most interesting to my Dorothy rises before my mind’s eye … I opened the door to him attracted by the family knock & was much surprised to see our friend standing on the door step with very long hair & a large bunch of roses – he is improved as to appearance by his tour, being fatter & with more colour. But London is already beginning to tell. The family congregated in the hall to talk – imagine us round the oak chest – Walter to the right, rather overcome by the meeting – a little husky as to the voice which I thought to be a cold. Janie and I propped against the matting – my favourite position with a good view of the looking glass – Jessie [Thomas, the Cobdens’ cousin] dancing around after her manner with a large sunflower – Nellie arranging roses – the poor roses were overblown & fell in showers on the stone floor.’⁹⁴

Although Walter begged the Cobdens not to come and see him acting at the Standard, he must have known they would. Along with their friend Theodore Beck they crept in, unheralded, two days later and were charmed by the theatre (‘a beauty inside’), noting particularly the ‘noble curve’ of the – alas, entirely empty – dress circle. They considered Walter’s acting – on the whole – ‘so much better’ than at the start of the tour; although his good notices as the ‘French Prisoner’ had perhaps rather over-encouraged him. When, with ‘his eyes rolling & stiff black hair standing upright on his head’ he dashed on to the stage, collapsed on to his knees and then – as he thought Pistol was about to kill him – rose up on them in an agony of terror, it reminded Maggie Cobden of ‘a Christmas pantomime’. Before the last scene, ‘The Grand Tableau of the Entry into London’, they sent a note round to announce their presence, and were amused to notice that when Walter next appeared on stage he was clutching the scrap of paper.⁹⁵

Walter met them after the final curtain. He was on a high. He was also ravenously hungry, and on their way home together insisted on stopping at a dairy where he drank off three glasses of milk in quick succession. He escorted the Cobden girls back to York Place on the bus, then stayed to supper and went on talking late into the night. There was a sort of irresistible, if slightly manic, energy about him. Excitement, drama, self-dramatization, not untinged with self-mockery, touched everything he did over the following weeks. He spent much of his limited free time at York Place. ‘Walter is here roughly speaking from morning to night,’ Maggie reported and most of the time he was in what she described as a ‘rampant humour’.⁹⁶ One Sunday evening he insisted on acting out most of Hamlet for their amusement, taking the different parts in turn.⁹⁷ The limitations of the ‘general utility’ player were chafing.

He had his photograph taken, looking like the smouldering matinée idol he had not yet become. Off the stage he tried out the part of ‘host’, laying on one hilarious tea party at his book-strewn rooms in Claremont Square, where the company (Nellie, Maggie, Jessie Thomas, Theodore Beck, and a Mr Nicholson) had to make do with an ‘average of one knife to 3 persons’. They then all crowded on to the little first-floor balcony and ‘speculated on the different deaths [they] should die if it gave way’. Within the merry flow of group activity his particular bond of understanding and attraction with Nellie Cobden quietly strengthened.⁹⁸

There was a brief interruption to these pleasures when, after the Shoreditch residency, the Rignold Company moved down to Exeter on the final stage of the tour. Walter delayed his departure to the last moment in order to snatch an extra day with the Cobden girls. Having told his family that he was travelling down with the rest of the company on the Sunday morning he snuck off instead on a jaunt to Richmond with Ellen and Maggie. It was scarcely a quiet Sunday outing. Walter was ‘uproarious’ throughout the journey, shrieking Irvingesque snatches of dialogue out of the railway carriage window, and down the communication tube into the next carriage. And when they reached Richmond he insisted on them all racing down a steep field. Then they hired a boat and rowed up stream for an hour. Walter’s hair, which had grown into a long golden mane, provoked considerable comment. The holiday fishermen were ‘roused from silence at the sight of the yellow locks’, and wanted to know ‘why he robbed the barber’. Walter remained unfazed by the general interest in his coiffure. He was too busy noting the resemblance of the fishermen on their punts to Leech’s drawings of such scenes.⁹⁹

They came home on the bus after stopping at an inn where Walter and Ellen shared a ‘tankard of amber ale’. The beer did nothing to quell Walter’s spirits. That evening at York Place, where he stayed till midnight, he was, according to Maggie’s account, ‘more or less mad’, and spent at least some of the time ‘pouring eau de cologne on everyone’s heads’. As if unable to bear the prospect of separation, he turned up again first thing the next morning on his way to the station. Ellen accompanied him as far as Piccadilly before saying a final farewell.¹⁰⁰

He looked a romantic figure beneath his flowing mane; his luggage comprised a small carpetbag, a sword, three books, and an Arab blanket. The effect was probably well calculated. Walter was beginning to weave elements of theatricality into his life – to adopt roles, don costumes, and assume guises. By the time of his return to London six weeks later, he had struck a new pose. ‘His appearance was a shock,’ Maggie told Dolla Richmond. ‘All his beautiful locks cut off and the stubby remains brushed straight up his head like a French boy’s’, or a ‘costermonger[’s]’. He was, she remarked, altogether ‘a changeling’.¹⁰¹ He had left a Byronic wanderer, and returned as a barrow-boy. Other changes soon followed. He appeared next as a metropolitan dandy in a very smart frock coat.¹⁰² It was but another role in what would become a large – and ever revolving – personal repertoire. In the first instance these masks revealed rather than concealed. They were projections of his own character, dramatizing his interests and his aspirations. The frequent changes, if they suggested a certain restlessness, reflected too a love of variety and of fun. Sickert enjoyed creating a dramatic moment: he knew that his quick changes, outlandish outfits, and extravagant poses had the power to surprise, confuse, even shock.

Despite the mutability of his appearance, he remained constant to the Cobdens. He spent so much of his time with them that his mother finally protested that when next he came to London he should live at York Place altogether. While looking for a new engagement after the end of the Rignold tour, he was free to spend his days chez Cobden, and his evenings going to the theatre.¹⁰³ He went one evening with Ellen to see Madame Modjeska at the Royal Court (then in Lower George Street, Chelsea); she had gained her desire and, in an echo of that summer’s experiment, was playing Romeo and Juliet opposite Johnston Forbes-Robertson. At Edwin Booth’s Hamlet he saw Ellen Terry sitting in a box surrounded by Forbes-Robertsons and attended by Oscar Wilde; they were too busy talking to pay much attention to the play – or any to Walter. These were tantalizing glimpses of a familiar world that remained – even after a year of effort – still just outside his grasp.¹⁰⁴

That December also revealed, for the first time, the limits of Ellen Cobden’s constitution. For all her energy, gaiety, and wit she was prone to sudden collapses and bouts of scarcely defined ‘ill-health’. Although she was happy to go with Walter to the theatre, she was less willing to go on to the parties afterwards. Walter would go without her. His high spirits always added ‘much to the pleasure’ of such occasions, at least according to Maggie Cobden – though some hostesses might have been slightly alarmed at his behaviour. At the Masons’ dance just before Christmas he was ‘excessively wild’, attempting, amongst other antics, to tie some trimming from Maggie Cobden’s dress around his head while quoting the lines from Iolanthe – ‘thy scarf I’ll bind about my plumed helm’. On the way home in the Cobdens’ carriage in the early hours, he roused the neighbourhood by shouting out the ‘curse of Rome’ speech from Bulwer-Lytton’s play Richelieu ‘in an Irving voice’, ending in ‘a sort of frenzied shriek’. The performance startled a timid youth to whom they were giving a lift home. The boy’s alarm, Maggie reported, was only compounded when, on setting him down, Walter ‘was all suavity and enquired tenderly if we couldn’t have the pleasure of taking him right home’. Faced by this sudden and unexpected change in manner the poor fellow fled.¹⁰⁵

If Walter’s frustrated energies sometimes found vent in wildness, he could also direct them into acts of kindness. He charmed the Cobden sisters with improving little gifts: Maggie received, as a Valentine present, a volume of Hans Andersen fairy stories – in German.¹⁰⁶ At Easter 1881 he went down to Midhurst, where the Cobdens had a cottage close to their old family home at Dunford, and made a considerable impression on the locals, who thought he must be Maggie’s beau rather than Ellen’s.¹⁰⁷ He escorted ever-shifting combinations of sisters to social and cultural events. He was with Maggie at William Morris’s riverside house on Boat Race day, together with a large crowd of other guests (including most of his own family). After the excitement of the race – and the lunch – he captained one side in what Helena remembered was ‘a delirious game of Prisoner’s Base’.¹⁰⁸ And on another memorable excursion Walter led Maggie and Annie to the stage door of the Lyceum and introduced them to their idol, Ellen Terry. They presented her with a little bunch of red and white roses, and were rewarded with thanks and kisses. To help them recover from this great excitement he then took them to a little Italian coffee house where they had hot chocolate and ‘maccaroni’.¹⁰⁹

When the Sickerts hosted another party that summer, Walter delivered a bunch of sweet peas to York Place in the morning to be divided up between the four sisters, who – ‘contrary to all rule’ – had agreed to attend en masse. On his way over to Baker Street he had, much to his amusement, encountered an old family friend, who, seeing the flowers, remarked, ‘Oh, those are for the beloved. I shall see who wears them this evening.’ He relished the prospect of her confusion when she was confronted by not one but four ‘beloveds’. (There were in fact five ‘beloveds’, as Jessie Thomas was staying at York Place and came to the party wearing her share of Walter’s sweet peas.¹¹⁰)

Despite his small successes with Rignold and at Sadler’s Wells, Sickert’s acting career still stubbornly refused to ignite. He continued to get scraps of work as a super at the Lyceum, and he seems to have appeared at the Globe;¹¹¹ but there were no substantial roles. It is difficult to know why this should have been. From the very limited evidence available it would seem that he had real, if not an exceptional, ability. He had excellent connections, and no shortage of self-belief. As he declared cheerfully to Maggie Cobden, he was blessed with ‘more advantages than most young men on the stage – namely great physical and intellectual [gifts] & a social position’; and indeed Maggie was mystified as to why the London theatre managers were not courting him. He was looking, she considered, particularly ‘beautiful’ in his new dandified persona: for evening wear he had adopted a splendid opera hat ‘of Irving like proportions’, which he wore inclined slightly over one eye to ‘fascinating’ effect. But if it fascinated Maggie Cobden and her friends, it still failed to attract the notice of London theatrical impressarios.¹¹²

His most arduous theatrical engagement during the first half of 1881 was a morning spent with Ellen Terry, ‘flying about Regent Street … having Desdemona night-gowns draped upon him’ as the actress tried to decide on her costume for the forthcoming Lyceum production of Othello.¹¹³ Indeed the Cobden girls were more actively involved in dramatic pursuits than he was: they were busy rehearsing a rather overdressed amateur production of Romeo and Juliet.¹¹⁴

Walter tried not to be too downhearted by his periods of enforced idleness. He perhaps drew some comfort from the sad predicaments of his brothers, now both embarked on careers of their own. Robert, having passed his school years ‘in a sort of dream’, had been put into the uncongenial surroundings of a London office. Though conscientious, he was quite unable to interest himself in the duties of a ‘merchant’s clerk’. But he lacked the energy to test his own gifts, such as they were, for comic writing and drawing. Bernhard was faring even worse as an assistant master at a private school, a job for which his sister described him as ‘manifestly unfit’. The boys were ‘all over him’.¹¹⁵ He, like Walter, wanted to be a painter, but his father would not hear of it. And when his teaching career came to a swift and abrupt end, he was found a berth as secretary to the financial editor of The Times – a position made neither easy nor enjoyable by his total inaptitude for figures.¹¹⁶

For Walter, at least, days of ‘resting’ could be pleasurably spent. His free time, though much taken up with the happy distractions of York Place, was not entirely given over to flirtation and courtship. Leisure also allowed him to pursue other interests. He saw something of Godwin. They went together to William Poel’s production of Hamlet at St George’s Hall. Godwin, according to Sickert’s account, ‘had to leave early and asked me to write a paragraph or two on the production for his paper, the British Architect’. Although it was Sickert’s journalistic debut, he had no hesitation in boldly urging that it would be ‘a great loss to the professional stage if Miss Helen Maud [the amateur actress in the part of Ophelia] did not become at once a member of it’.¹¹⁷ It was a good call. Miss Maud (or Maud Holt as she was known off the stage) married the successful actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree the following year, and enjoyed a successful stage-career at his side. Nevertheless, the notice, for all his prescience, did not lead at once to other writing commissions.*

Walter continued to study under his father and to visit Scholderer’s studio, working, as Janie Cobden reported approvingly, ‘pretty hard at his drawing’.¹¹⁸ Staying with the Scholderers at Putney that June was Henri Fantin-Latour, whose freely worked flower paintings were beginning to get a market in England thanks to the efforts of Mrs Edwin Edwards.¹¹⁹ He was another link in the great ‘French tradition’ that Sickert was eagerly discovering. Sickert also made a special expedition with Godwin to see The Sower, a painting by the recently deceased Jean-François Millet that was being exhibited at Number 8 Pall Mall.¹²⁰ It was his introduction to the work of the so-called Barbizon School. He was impressed by Millet’s carefully constructed picture: a scene of everyday life built up from deep knowledge and accumulated observations. But it did not carry him away as Whistler’s work had done.

Whistler was back in London. After his year-long exile he had announced his return with an exhibition of Venice etchings at the Fine Art Society, closely followed by a show of Venice pastels at the same venue. Sickert feasted upon Whistler’s pictures and became increasingly infected with their vision. On the long summer evenings he would sit in Regent’s Park with Ellen and her sisters, noting the ‘very Whistler like’ effects of the gathering dusk. And then he would try to sketch them.¹²¹

For the last ten or so weeks of the summer, Nellie and Maggie Cobden took a house on the far north coast of Scotland.¹²² Sickert, it was agreed, would join them there. He travelled up to Sutherland at the end of July, and was at once charmed by the setting.¹²³ Rispond House is a fine, almost grand, white-fronted building, set in a perfect little natural harbour near the mouth of Loch Eriboll, a mile or so from the village of Durness. It is a beautiful spot in fine weather, with its little stone jetty, its walled kitchen garden, the hills folding round it, and the clear blue skies stretching northwards towards the Arctic.

The Cobdens were sharing the house with their bluestocking friend Dr Louisa Atkins, who was accompanied by two of her students. Although they dined together, the two parties maintained some lines of informal separation, having the use of the main drawing room on alternate days. The usual tenant of the house, Mr Swanson, an irritatingly garrulous man with a slight facial deformity, had moved into a little house out the back, together with his wife.

Sickert arrived full of his own plans. Maggie described him as being ‘very argumentative & grandfatherly’. His first act was to announce piously that he would be going to bed ‘every night at eight in order to get up at 4 & paint’.¹²⁴ Perhaps happily for the general harmony of the party he seems to have abandoned this extreme regime, but he did devote much of his time to work.¹²⁵ Ignoring the rather frequent winds and rains (‘the weather is not all we could desire’) – and Mr Swanson’s unhelpful suggestions as to the most picturesque vistas – Sickert would spend whole days ‘working at some beloved subject’ out in the open air, sometimes sustained by nothing more than a piece of oatcake.¹²⁶ There were, however, occasional let-ups in the programme, some of them enforced. After painting out of doors for the whole of one dismal afternoon he developed ‘a touch of lumbago’ and had to rest.¹²⁷

Besides plunging into his work, Walter also plunged into the sea. It was not a great success. Despite being wrapped up in an elaborate costume of his own devising – ‘bathing drawers’ and a white shirt worn over ankle-length merino combinations – he nearly froze.¹²⁸ Maggie, who had given up bathing after a very brief experiment, was delighted to report that when he appeared at lunch after one swimming expedition ‘he was blue & red in the face – his jaws chattered & his hands were dead white & shook as though he had the palsy’. Although he persisted for a while, even his ardour seems to have been dimmed. Scottish bathing, he began to suspect, did ‘not agree with him’.¹²⁹ Under the circumstances, he must have been rather impressed by Nellie’s ability to swim each day without ill effect.¹³⁰

Exposure and lumbago were not the only woes Walter endured at Rispond. He badly turned his knee while trying to re-float Dr Atkins in her rowing boat after she had run aground in the little bay. Although the knee cap clicked back into position at once, it needed to be bound up in bandages. He was forced to keep quiet, and not go ‘prancing over the hills’, for several days. He devoted himself to assuming a new guise, growing his hair and also ‘a dear little moustache & beard of delicate red’, which, no sooner had it been generally admired, than he threatened to shave off. He also found diversion in the novels of the Brontë sisters. He had brought ‘nearly all’ of their books with him, and they provided a common theme for the party. By the end of the holiday both he and the Cobden sisters had the Brontës ‘on the brain’.¹³¹ (Wuthering Heights was his especial – and enduring – favourite; he felt that it soared ‘beyond the frontiers of prose’.¹³²) A visit was planned on the way south to the family parsonage at Haworth.

They finally left Sutherland in the second week of October. It took them five days to get home. There were stops not only at Haworth but also at Inverness, Berwick, and York. At York they spent one uncomfortable night at the Leopard, an old inn close to the Minster which Walter seems to have visited during the Yorkshire leg of his Henry V tour, and had been recommending fulsomely to everyone ‘for the last year.’ The Cobden sisters did not share his enthusiasm for the quaint old place. Having groped their way up a pitch-black stairway and been led through a billiard room, they were shown into a tiny bedroom, like ‘the garrets in Hogarth’s pictures’. They insisted on swapping with Walter, who had a slightly less garret-like room on the floor below, but it was a scant improvement. They got no sleep: all night the clock struck the quarters, and in the early hours a large wagon rolled by sounding, as Nellie said, ‘like the Tower of Babel passing’. When they escaped in the morning, they were horrified and amused to meet a London friend – a young clergyman – looking up at the sign and preparing to enter, having been recommended the place by Walter too.¹³³

It is not known whether the Cobden sisters saved the man from his ordeal. They certainly moved to save themselves from any further discomfort. ‘After a great deal of trouble we have taught Walter the difference between an Inn & a Public House,’ wrote Maggie. ‘The dear Leopard is unfortunately the latter.’¹³⁴ This, of course, is probably what attracted Sickert to it. He was already beginning to develop a relish for the popular, the sordid, and the authentic, for that characterful world first distilled ‘in Hogarth’s pictures’.

The ten weeks that Walter spent at Rispond House marked a watershed. They provided an unprecedented chance for concentrated work and also for concentrated intimacy with Nellie Cobden. It was an opportunity, too, to plan for the future. He had come of age at the end of May and his formal entry into adulthood may have quickened his sense of resolve. By the end of the holiday he had taken two important decisions. He enrolled for a course at the Slade School of Art, and he became engaged to Nellie. The two things may even have been connected.

Helena Sickert recorded that, at this juncture, Walter was ‘helped to follow his true vocation’, while Sickert’s friend and first biographer Robert Emmons states more boldly that Oswald Sickert, ‘seeing that [Nellie Cobden] had a fortune of her own … agreed to his son’s giving up the stage’.¹³⁵ This, however, may be overstating the case. Nellie certainly wanted to help Walter. She loved him and had come to regard him as a rare talent. And for all her proclaimed belief in feminine independence she regarded it as particularly her vocation to assist the genius of others. As one of her friends noted, ‘she took the part of men and women whose dreams went far and farther than far, provided always they had the courage of their desires’. It seemed to her that to ‘be born with wings and not to fly’ was ‘the commonest tragedy’ of modern life.¹³⁶ She wanted Walter to escape that fate; she hoped to help him spread his wings and launch himself into the air. Shelley was her ideal (‘as near perfection as human nature had so far reached’),¹³⁷ and there was, to her, something Shelley-like about Sickert, with his blond locks, his intense energy, his burning commitment. Nevertheless, while she felt sure of his genius, she – like Mr and Mrs Sickert – was not yet quite certain where that genius lay: in the studio or on the stage.

Walter himself was in no hurry to abandon acting completely. His Slade course was only for one year, and the hours were not long. They did not preclude the possibility of theatrical engagements, or eclipse the vision of an artistic reputation being supported by a brilliant stage career. His first step towards a formal art training did little more than mark a tilt in balance between the two spheres of his ambition. It was agreed that Walter and Ellen’s engagement should be for eighteen months: they would marry in the summer of 1883. In the meantime, Walter would continue to live at home, and the arrangement would be kept as a family secret.¹³⁸ Perhaps after that period the outlines of Walter’s future would be clearer.

The reaction of Nellie’s sisters to the engagement was mixed. Maggie and Annie (as well as Jessie Thomas) were all conventionally ‘delighted’, while Jane Cobden thought ‘Nellie ought to have gone in for a Cabinet Minister’. Maggie, however, confided to Dolla Richmond that Walter was one of the very few people that she herself could have imagined being married to, adding the rather unconvincing caveat, ‘mind, I wasn’t in love with him’. She drew what consolation she could from the thought that others might be similarly disappointed: ‘Won’t there be a shrieking over the length & breadth of the land when [the engagement] is made known.’¹³⁹

Having decided upon enrolling at an art school, Sickert’s choice of the Slade was all but inevitable. He had spent the previous five years consorting with Slade students, Gower Street was familiar territory to him, and Alphonse Legros, the head of the school, belonged to that same mid-century Parisian art world in which Oswald Sickert, Otto Scholderer, Fantin-Latour, and Whistler had been schooled – indeed Legros, Fantin, and Whistler had formed a short-lived triumvirate, le Groupe de Trois. Sickert first attended on 18 October 1881, two weeks after the beginning of the new term, and almost a week after his return from Scotland.¹⁴⁰ Whatever his hopes for the course, they soon foundered. The atmosphere of the school was severe, muted, and academic. The high spirits of the Slade rabble-rousers found no echo inside the teaching studios. The sexes were segregated, classes were small, and the general standard low. First-year students were expected to work exclusively from the cast, toiling from morning to late afternoon with greasy ‘Italian chalk’ to set down on large sheets of unforgiving ‘Ingres paper’ the planes and shadows of some classical figure or Renaissance bust. Legros himself, with his sober, baleful features and grey-flecked beard, was a distant figure. Unable, or unwilling, to speak English, despite his long years of residence – and his marriage to an Englishwoman – he communicated largely through his assistants and subordinates. His comments were terse, his direct instruction limited to painting the occasional demonstration picture in front of the class.¹⁴¹

Sickert’s later verdict on his teacher was harsh, and grew harsher over the years. He recognized the sincerity and, indeed, the achievement of Legros’ art – particularly his etching and his imaginative paintings,¹⁴² and he concurred in his deep respect for tradition and the work of the old masters. But he felt that, as a teacher, he was a failure. It was not his métier.

‘Legros,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘has been spoken of as a great teacher, which he wasn’t … A great teacher vivifies not one or two, but hundreds of students directly, and, indirectly, countless ones. He reclaims whole intellectual territories into cultivation, and leaves his mark on generations.’ On all these fronts Legros failed. His professorship, moreover, ‘depleted his creative energy, instead of nourishing it’.

A great teacher is refreshed and inspired, not only by his direct, but by his indirect creation. Legros had no clearly reasoned philosophy of procedure, and did not understand the closely-woven plexus between observation, drawing, composition, and colour. The heads he painted in two hours before his classes, with their entire absence of relation between head and background, were almost models of how not to do it. It is scarcely a paradox to say that a professor of painting should show rather how little, than how much, can properly be done in the first coat of paint, if the last is to crown a work, as distinguished from a sketch.¹⁴³

It is doubtful that Sickert had worked out all these objections to Legros’ method during the first weeks of his studentship. In the autumn of 1881 he is more likely to have registered only a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

He made no friendships amongst his fellow pupils,¹⁴⁴ and the focus of his artistic interest rested outside the school. Whistler remained ‘the god of his idolatry’, and much time was spent at the shrine.¹⁴⁵ Whistler was not averse to worship, particularly from so adept a votary. Sickert’s flattery was informed, unflagging, and intelligent. On one visit he pleased Whistler by remarking that what the ignorant public could not abide in his portraits was the uneasy sense that ‘these devil-maycare people were laughing at them’.¹⁴⁶ Even better than this, Walter’s admiration was exclusive. He declined, for instance, to share Maggie Cobden’s enthusiasm for a Samuel Palmer exhibition because, as she remarked, for him ‘there is one God, and his name is Jimmy’.¹⁴⁷

Whistler knew how to reward such loyalty. It was probably his influence that lay behind the inclusion of one of Walter’s Scottish paintings in a group show at the Fine Art Society that winter. The view of Loch Eriboll was Sickert’s first exhibited picture,¹⁴⁸ and it was perhaps in the hope of repaying this favour that, at the beginning of December, Walter took Maggie and Annie Cobden to visit Whistler in his new studio at 13 Tite Street, across the way from the White House – which, with ghastly irony, had been bought by Whistler’s arch enemy, The Times’s art critic, Henry (Harry or ‘Arry’) Quilter. They spent ‘a very good time’ looking at his pictures, and although Annie thought that Whistler’s hospitality had sprung from ‘the goodness of his heart’, Maggie suspected that an unspoken hope that they might commission portraits lay behind the visit.¹⁴⁹

Ellen did not accompany them. She was not well again. There had been signs of a decline in her health during the last days of the Scottish holiday, and they had become more marked since the return south. She retired to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast to see what sea air and rest could do for her.¹⁵⁰ Walter, however, was kept in London. Rather unexpectedly, his theatrical career had spluttered back to life. Dr Maclear invited him back to perform once again at the KCS Christmas prize day. It was a return to the scene of past triumphs. Doubtless under the influence of Godwin’s theories on period dress, he hired an ‘authentic’ costume from a top outfitters and, splendidly attired in red tights and a black velvet doublet with yellow lined sleeves, revived the scene of ‘Clarence’s Dream’ from Richard III. Maggie Cobden was not entirely convinced. She thought his performance ‘rather too laboured’ and only ‘moderately good’. Stripped of its Irvingesque mannerisms, Walter’s voice, she considered, lacked the power to carry in a big theatre.¹⁵¹ Despite these doubts about his powers of projection, Walter secured ‘a small engagement’ with the Kendals at the St James’s Theatre: Johnston Forbes-Robertson had given him an introduction to Mrs Kendal, and she had been ‘v. sweet to him’. He was to appear in some minor non-speaking capacity in their production of Pinero’s The Squire, as well as understudying two of the leading players. And there was a hope that he would ‘get on’ at this new theatre.¹⁵² The play was scheduled to open at the end of the year.

Ellen returned from Aldeburgh before Christmas. The back drawing room at York Place was set aside for her exclusive use. The prime topic of conversation amongst the sisters was where Walter and Nellie should live after they were married. If the question was slightly premature, it was still fun to consider. Campden Hill was the early favourite. It was agreed that each sister – as a wedding gift – would pay for the furnishing and decoration of a different room.¹⁵³ Annie – who was to be responsible for the dining room – had particularly strong views about interior decor, favouring whitewash instead of wallpaper.¹⁵⁴ Walter joined in these deliberations. He would spend his evenings with Ellen, though his days were much taken up with ‘benefitting his soul’ – and learning his part – by sitting in on rehearsals at the theatre.¹⁵⁵

The first night of The Squire was on 29 December 1881. Walter, despite being only a ‘super’, threw himself into proceedings with typical energy. He had devised a very elaborate make-up for his fleeting appearance as ‘a toothless old man’ in one of the crowd scenes, and was so proud of it that he challenged his own mother to recognize him.¹⁵⁶ It is not recorded whether, during the three-month run, Walter ever had to step up to play either of the parts he was understudying. He did, however, become friendly with one of the actors he was covering for. Brandon Thomas, or ‘Mr Brandon’ as he appeared on the playbill, was a jovial 32-year-old Liverpudlian.¹⁵⁷ He was much interested in contemporary art, and was a keen admirer of Whistler’s work. Walter greatly impressed him with his knowledge of painting and, more specifically, with his claims to an actual connection with Whistler.¹⁵⁸ It was a connection that was strengthened in the New Year. During the early months of 1882 Sickert’s attendance at the Slade slackened. The demands of the theatre doubtless took their toll, but they were coupled with his growing sense of dissatisfaction at the Legros regime. He confided his disillusionment to Whistler, who is said to have remarked, with characteristic pith, ‘You have wasted your money, Walter: there’s no use in wasting your time too!’¹⁵⁹ He invited him, instead, to come and work at his studio, to exchange the conventional world of the art school for the richer Renaissance concept of discipleship to a Master.

It was often suggested, particularly by those who knew him in later life, that ‘to understand Sickert it has to be remembered that he was an actor in his youth’.¹⁶⁰ His delight in costume and taking on roles, the range and control of his voice, his sense of the dramatic moment, were certainly very theatrical in their effect, but they were elements of his character that attracted him to the stage, rather than tics he learned while touring the provinces as a ‘Utility Gentleman’. Nevertheless, his connection with the profession, however brief and undistinguished, was important to him. It did colour both his life and his art, and as the years passed he proclaimed it ever more insistently. Theatrical allusions came to litter his conversation. He delighted in recalling thespian anecdotes: the time old Tom Mead, playing the ghost in Hamlet, appeared by mistake directly behind Irving and – in ‘quite a new effect’ – called out, ‘Here. Here’ to announce his presence.¹⁶¹ He used stage vocabulary for non-stage matters, referring to the ‘off-prompt side’ of his pictures. And he would recite huge swathes of Shakespeare impromptu. To the end of his days, his party piece remained a one-man rendition of a scene from Hamlet as played by a motley touring troupe (based surely on the Rignolds). He enjoyed the company of actors; he kept abreast of the London stage. In his art he used the theatre as a subject. But, more than this, his time on the stage gave him a sense of showmanship – of the actor-manager’s role – which he transferred to his artistic career. And though he never played to the audience in his painting, he remained conscious that there was an audience. That communication was part of art – along with laughter, outrage, and applause.

* The children were originally given the surname Godwin, but it was subsequently changed to Craig after Ellen had been inspired by a trip to Ailsa Craig off the coast of Scotland.

* When Ellen was appearing in Tennyson’s classical verse drama The Cup, Godwin sketched out for her a series of figures showing which attitudes – according to the evidence of archaeology – would be appropriate for her to adopt in her role as a Greek priestess.

* Sickert was confirmed in his belief that acting need not, indeed should not, be an exclusive concern when – one evening, while waiting in the wings at the Lyceum – a young actor called Arthur Wing Pinero confided to him his ambitions to be a playwright and his excitement at having had a one-act sketch accepted by Irving for use as a ‘curtain-raiser’ (The Observer, 9 December 1934).

* They had an elder sister, Kate, who since 1866 had been married to Richard Fisher. Two brothers and another sister had died in infancy.

* The exact figures are unclear. Cobden’s estate was valued at ‘under £40,000’ at his death. Although Ellen Cobden, when first setting up home, told her mother she would need an income of £250 per annum, she and her sisters appear to have been even better provided for. Jane Cobden’s nephew thought that his aunt had £1,000 a year at the time of her marriage in the early 1890s, although his may have been no more than a symbolic figure, representing substantial wealth. Annie Cobden in 1890, some ten years after her marriage, had an income of around £500 p.a., but it is probable that she had made substantial inroads into her capital by then.

* Sickert, though he tolerated and even enjoyed mess, was ‘extremely particular about cleanliness’. He had, as one friend recalled, ‘a passion for hygiene’. If he discovered that he had picked up and put on a stranger’s hat, he would wash his head at the soonest opportunity. He liked to take a daily bath (‘Letters to Florence Pash’, 3).

* Oswald Adalbert had been naturalized in June 1879.

† This is a revelation. Walter’s handwriting – as in his letters to Pollard – was terrible.

* Sickert’s ‘review’, which he described so vividly in a letter to The Times in 1934, remains a conundrum. It does not appear in the British Architect. He may – as Godwin’s son suggested – have reviewed the play for some other journal. Or perhaps he wrote about a different play. There are several other notices of Helen Maud’s performances in the British Architect during the course of the year. E. W. Godwin’s diary for 10 December reads: ‘Evening to Club. Sigurd [Sickert] came, dined at Criterion & on with him to St George’s Hall amateur performance – Still Waters [Run Deep]. Home directly it was over.’ In the next issue of the British Architect (16 December 1881, 629–30) an unsigned review appeared declaring that the play ‘had a special artistic interest for it gave us another opportunity of seeing Miss Helen Maud act. It is not often that an amateur performance leaves one with any memory or any new light; but in the nature of things, it is at amateur performances that now and again we discover the actor or actress, the unmistakable diamond embedded in the gravel. Rarely indeed do we see on any stage such refined, spontaneous acting as that which Miss Maud showed in playing Mrs Mildmay, curiously free, moreover, from the faults usually incident upon inexperience.’

II WHISTLER’S STUDIO

Whistler inducted me into some understanding of painting.

(Walter Sickert to John Collier)

From the staid world of the Slade cast room Sickert found himself carried off into the hectic whirl of Whistler’s professional and private life. Not that there seemed to be much distinction between the two. Whistler liked to work amongst a camarade. The large studio room at the back of 13 Tite Street was almost always busy with callers, models, chaperones, sitters, and assistants. Visitors came from Paris and from across the Atlantic. And at the un-still centre of this shifting throng was Whistler himself: the focus of all attention and the source of all energy. He moved constantly about the room with the lightness, neatness, and decision of an armed butterfly: flitting from his table-palette to his canvas wielding his long-handled brushes; poring over portfolios of choice old papers; lovingly inking up his printing plates; drafting letters to the press; and all the time firing off fusillades of sharp laughter and sharper talk.

Sickert found an already established studio retinue. It included a mild-mannered lunatic – a one-time designer for Minton’s pottery – who would potter about, a shadow to the Master, making innumerable sketches on scraps of brown paper. Maud Franklin, Whistler’s slender, buck-toothed mistress, though often ill during 1882, was still in evidence as both model and student. Another more openly acknowledged pupil was the sleek, fair-haired Australian, Mortimer Menpes. Born in Adelaide in the same year as Sickert, he had come to London to study under Edward Poynter. He showed a precocious ability as an etcher, and it was after Whistler had noticed one of his student works that he had abandoned the National Art School and joined the Master’s entourage, assisting him in printing up the first set of Venice etchings.¹ Beyond this inner core, a shifting group of other young artists made up a less formal, but no less devoted, honour guard. A trio of magnificently moustachioed Americans, Harper Pennington and the brothers Waldo and Julian Story, came often to the studio, as did Francis James, a delicate watercolourist of delicate flower pictures. The fashionable portraitist Frank Miles, though an object of mild derision amongst the other followers, called by almost daily from his studio across the way (a studio designed by E. W. Godwin).²

Of the older generation of Whistler’s friends, some few stayed loyal: Godwin, of course, and his young wife; Albert Moore, the painter of self-absorbed classical beauties; Thomas Way, the specialist printer who helped Whistler with his etching. Charles Keene, whose work Whistler admired greatly, was another occasional caller. The prevailing atmosphere, however, was one of youth, and not always very critical adulation. And that was how Whistler liked it. He preferred, so he said, the company of ‘les jeunes fous que vieux imbéciles’.³

There was one notable absentee. Oscar Wilde, who throughout the previous year had been a constant presence at the studio, was away lecturing in America on art and home decoration. It was a year-long tour. But news of Wilde’s triumphs percolated back to Tite Street: he made sure of it by arranging for Whistler to be sent press notices. And the reports of Wilde’s transatlantic triumphs served to sharpen the never quite concealed spice of rivalry that lay beneath the bantering friendship of the two men.*

Amongst the many who did come to Whistler’s studio, buyers and sitters were disappointingly rare. Whistler’s attempts to woo ‘Society’ at his celebrated Sunday breakfasts achieved only a limited success. Lords, ladies, and plutocrats might come to eat his food and enjoy his wine, but they persisted in regarding him and his art as a sort of ingenious joke. Indeed many of them assumed that Whistler regarded matters in the same light, and thought they were only being polite in laughing.⁴ Others were reluctant to pose for different reasons. After the debacle of the Ruskin trial, and Whistler’s no less public dispute with Sir Frederic Leyland over the bill for the decoration of the Peacock Room, his reputation was suspect. To have one’s portrait painted by Whistler was, they felt, to risk the ridicule of the artistic world, to say nothing of the possible ire of the artist if things did not work out as he wished. Those few who did commission portraits in the early 1880s were either brave or reckless – brazen demi-mondaines, old friends, independent spirits, and Americans. In the absence of more numerous commissions Whistler made use of models both professional and amateur. On occasion he even picked people off the street and invited them to pose at the studio. Failing that, he painted himself or his studio assistants. Sickert was soon pressed into service as a model.⁵

Whistler’s world was totally engrossing – to himself and to those about him. It was a world dominated by art, or by Whistler’s conception of art. His person and his pictures were the twinned and abiding themes of his existence, and Sickert – along with Menpes – came to share the same perspective. Sickert’s commitment was total. With the closing of The Squire in March 1882 he abandoned the stage completely, to concentrate on his discipleship. Menpes has left a vivid account of the daily round: the early summons by hand-delivered note (‘Come at once – important’); the close perusal of the morning post and papers, followed by the excited elaboration of scathing ripostes to any insults, real or perceived; the stroll around the shabby streets of old Chelsea armed with a pochade box (for small oil sketches) or an etching-plate in search of appealing subjects for a morning’s sketching – a street corner perhaps or a humble shopfront; the lunchtime omelette back at Tite Street (the creation of the omelette, being a work of art, fell to Whistler); and then the afternoon of work and talk in the studio.⁶

Whistler staged his indoor pictures with care. Sickert had to help prepare the studio for the various models and sitters, either establishing an elaborately informal mise-en-scène with suitable ‘aesthetic’ props, or erecting the cumbersome black velvet backdrop against which Whistler had taken to posing sitters for full-length portraits.⁷ Before beginning his picture Whistler would mix a quantity of all the tones he would require, and it became Sickert’s duty to set out these carefully prepared paints – in their designated order – on the glass-topped table that served as Whistler’s palette.⁸

Later, the pupils might walk with the Master into the West End to watch him ‘terrorize’ his tailor, his hairdresser, or the various Bond Street art dealers. (His method with these last was to stride through the door of their establishment, pause for an instant, and then exclaim ‘Ha, ha! Amazing!’ in a loud voice before sailing out again.) Or they might make a brief visit to the National Gallery. From there they would continue on a circuit of evening pleasures – receptions and private views, dinner at the Arts Club in Dover Street, very occasionally the theatre or a concert. (Whistler had no ear for music, and by and large found late-Victorian drama considerably less entertaining than his own existence.) The late hours were spent talking amongst friends at the Hogarth Club, the Falstaff, or the St Stephen’s before a walk home along the Embankment to admire the effects of the lamp-lit night over the river.⁹

This well-established routine was carried out against a shifting background of alarms and changes. Whistler, as Sickert soon recognized, liked to live life as a succession of crises.¹⁰ Both unwilling and unable to economize, he existed always on the brink of financial disaster. Other dramas, if less self-willed, were equally disturbing. Within weeks of Sickert’s arrival at Tite Street, the erstwhile pottery decorator had to be removed to a lunatic asylum. Several of Whistler’s precious portrait commissions came to premature ends. Sir Henry Cole, the head of the Kensington Museums, dropped dead (killed, as Sickert liked to believe, by the exertion of having to pose in a heavy Inverness cape).¹¹ Lady Meux, a former barmaid married to a brewery magnate, stormed off after a row, and Lady Archibald Campbell was only just persuaded not to abandon her own sittings following a heated difference of artistic opinion.¹² Such aesthetic squalls were common. Once Whistler was engaged upon a portrait he was tyrannical, demanding endless sittings, and treating his sitter as little more than a pictorial prop.¹³

Whistler, though never slow to give offence, was always quick to take it. He was a master in ‘the gentle art of making enemies’. He nursed grievances with care: to a suggestion that he should ‘Let bygones be bygones’ he replied hotly, ‘That is just what you must never let them be.’¹⁴ He was implacable in opposition, and never forgave. Having fallen from grace, his erstwhile disciples – the devoted Greaves brothers – were either not mentioned or dismissed as ‘negligible’.¹⁵

For Sickert, however, the evidence of such animosities merely emphasized his own privileged position within the charmed circle. And he was very conscious of how privileged it was. To have been suddenly swept into close daily contact with the ‘god of his idolatry’ was an extraordinary thing: the acme of his desires. Familiarity bred only deeper admiration. He found Whistler the man as great as Whistler the painter. In a considered summary of his qualities he described him as, ‘Sunny, courageous, handsome, soigné. Entertaining, serviable, gracious, good-natured, easy-going. A charmeur and a dandy with a passion for work. A heart that was ever lifted up by its courage and genius. A beacon of light and happiness to everyone who was privileged to come within its comforting and brightening rays.’¹⁶

Despite his designation as a ‘pupil’ of Whistler, Sickert was more a studio dogsbody than a student. He received no formal training at Tite Street. Whistler – even if he insisted on being addressed as Master – was not a natural teacher. He had no formulated scheme of how to proceed. ‘All you need to know,’ he told Sickert and Menpes, ‘is which end of the brush to put in your mouth.’¹⁷ Beyond this, lessons had to be learnt indirectly by observation and deduction.

There was plenty of opportunity. Sickert was able to watch Whistler at work every day – in the streets of Chelsea, and at the Tite Street studio. Sometimes he was allowed to paint alongside him from the same model, even on occasion taking his colours off the same palette. Whistler, though completely absorbed in his own work, might dispense the odd – and much cherished – word of general encouragement. Amongst his recurrent utterances were ‘Stick it Sickert’ and ‘Shove along Walter, shove along.’¹⁸ On very rare occasions he might even give a specific demonstration of some technical point. Sickert carefully preserved a ‘little panel of a model’ he had painted, ‘not very well’, and which Whistler finished ‘with some exquisite passages in a lace dress and velvet curtain’.¹⁹ But the pace of instruction could never be forced. Any direct question was likely to be answered with the explosion, ‘“Pshaw! You must be occupied with the Master, not with yourselves. There is plenty to be done.”’ And Whistler would promptly invent some task for his inquisitive assistant – ‘a picture to be taken to Dowdeswell’s [Gallery], or a copperplate to have a ground put on it.’²⁰ For Sickert and Menpes there remained always a tantalizing sense of mystery. ‘We felt’, Menpes recalled, ‘that the Master was in possession of tremendous secrets about art, but we never got within a certain crust of reserve … in which he kept his real artistic self.’ But then, as they admitted to each other, how could they expect that ‘one so great would readily reveal himself’.²¹

Nevertheless, through the days of close contact Sickert began slowly to build up an understanding of Whistler’s working methods. Whistler was a prima painter. He liked to use wet thin paint on wet thin paint, to work quickly, to cover the canvas in a single sitting – or as he put it, to complete the picture in ‘one wet’. There was little margin for error, or scope for correction, in such work. It was a method that required great skill, self-confidence, and no little daring. (Amongst the Whistlerian maxims that Sickert most cherished was the assertion, ‘We have only one enemy, and that is funk.’²²)

In the hands of a master, the prima method could yield a remarkable freshness of effect, a rare and harmonious smoothness of surface. And Whistler was a master. He inspired Sickert with an abiding ‘love of quality of execution’, a sense ‘that paint [was] itself a beautiful thing, with loveliness and charm and infinite variety’.²³ The lore of oil paint – its composition, its preparation, its dilution, and its application – was Whistler’s passion. It became Sickert’s too. Few artists spent more on materials than Sickert, or experimented more with ingredients. The whole ‘cooking side’ of painting absorbed his interest throughout his career. Over time, he acquired a knowledge of oil paint beyond that of almost any of his contemporaries.²⁴ But his knowledge never confined itself to recipes only. As an apprentice at Tite Street, Sickert came to understand that the elusive ‘quality’ that Whistler – and, indeed, all great artists – achieved in their painting was not merely a matter of materials and technical skill, but something more: ‘a certain beauty and fitness of expression in paint’. It might seem ‘ragged’ or ‘capricious’, yet it perfectly expressed the artist’s response to his chosen (and completely understood) subject.²⁵ To achieve for himself this perfect and personal harmony between paint, expression, and subject matter became the great and enduring quest of Sickert’s professional life: an obsession that coloured almost every aspect of his existence. The quest began in Whistler’s studio. And because it was in Whistler’s work that he first glimpsed the ideal, it was through imitation that he first sought to achieve it.

The ways in which Whistler deployed his chosen technique were various. He adopted subtly different approaches for different types of picture. The nocturnes were done from recollection. Whistler had learnt the exacting discipline of training the visual memory in Paris as a pupil of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Legros, too, had studied under Lecoq, but it was in the electric atmosphere of Tite Street, rather than at the Slade, that Sickert was introduced to the practice and became enthused about it. Lecoq’s course had been based on a series of exercises by which the mind was trained to absorb the salient details of a subject (the first lessons involved simple geometric forms) and then accurately to record them away from the motif. Whistler transformed the method into a ‘sort of game’. Sickert recalled walks along the river when he and his master would stop and ‘look for about ten minutes at a given subject, isolating it as much as possible from its surroundings’. And then, while Sickert checked his accuracy, Whistler would turn his back and try to recall the scene: ‘There is a tavern window, three panes wide one each side of the central partition and six panes deep. On the left is a red curtain half drawn … The tone of the roof is darker than that of the wall, but is warm in colour, and precisely the same in value as the sky behind it, which is a deep blue-grey.’ And so on.²⁶ Half marks would be awarded for remembering the position, size, and shape of the various objects that filled the scene and full marks for remembering the exact degrees of light and dark falling on them.²⁷ When he had got all the details right, Whistler would take a last look at the scene before they set off home, walking, for once, in silence ‘so that he might keep the impression fresh’.²⁸ The next morning, at the studio, he would paint the scene.

The Chelsea street scenes, by contrast, were done from life. Working en plein air was a relatively new departure for Whistler, but it suited his interests and his methods. Tiny, fleeting impressions of light and colour, devoid of detail, painted on panels only a few inches across, could be readily set down in ‘one wet’. Portraits were more problematic. They too were done from life, but on a large – almost life-size – scale. Whistler, who took a delight in all practical theories (a delight that he passed on to Sickert), believed that for the sake of pictorial precision it was important to paint to the scale of vision. He explained to Sickert that the human eye ‘could only see at one glance an object which in size was one-third of the distance between the eye and that object. In other words, if you [were] painting a man six feet high you should be 18 feet away from him.’ As a result, Whistler needed a very long studio. He was accustomed to place his model against the black velvet background, and alongside his model he placed his large-sized canvas. His painting table was 18 feet away. He would stand at his painting table, carefully survey the model, then, charging his long-handled brush with the requisite paint (considerably thinned with turpentine), would run at full tilt up to the canvas and drop the colour on the spot. It was an extraordinary performance, and many casual visitors to the studio assumed that it was put on merely for their benefit.

To capture the likeness of a human face and figure on a six-foot canvas in a single sitting was a difficult business. Whistler was not always successful at the first attempt, the second, or even the third and he would demand more and more sittings. But at these there could be no mere correction of the existing work: wet paint could not be put on top of dry paint. At each sitting, Whistler would in effect begin again. The surface of the picture was scrubbed down, and he would repaint the whole canvas. There was no building up of detail, only an ever increasing simplification. But the precious ‘unity’ of the picture – its ‘exquisite oneness’ – was maintained through the multiple operations, until Whistler finally achieved the desired effect and announced that the picture was finished.²⁹ At the end of each sitting there was always a moment of tension, as Whistler pondered his handiwork before passing judgement. Sickert recalled how, once, ‘after long standing on a chair with a candle, at the end of a sitting from Lady Archibald Campbell, and long indecision as to whether he should take out the day’s work or leave it, we went out along the Embankment to dinner. In the street he decided and said to me, “You go back. I shall only be nervous and begin to doubt again. Go back and take it all out” – which I did with a rag and benzoline.’³⁰

Whistler was a printmaker as well as a painter. His earliest prints had been closely worked creations done from drawings, but after his sojourn in Venice he adopted a freer and less laborious approach, working en plein air on small copper plates. Sickert described the new technique as ‘a free and inspired improvisation from nature’.³¹ The method suited Whistler’s febrile talent. He was a brilliant sketcher, with a gift for capturing a fugitive scene in a few lines. In part he was able to do this because of his idiosyncratic theory of composition.³² It was a theory that he passed on to his pupils one evening in a rare moment of direct instruction. Whistler described how in Venice, while drawing a bridge, ‘as though in a revelation’, the secret of drawing had come to him. ‘He felt that he wanted to keep it to himself, lest someone should use it, – it was so sure, so marvellous. This is roughly how he described it: “I began first of all by seizing upon the chief point of interest. Perhaps it might have been the extreme distance, – the little palaces and this shipping beneath the bridge. If so, I would begin drawing that distance in elaborately, and then would expand from it until I came to the bridge, which I would draw in one broad sweep. If by chance I did not see the whole of the bridge, I would not put it in. In this way the picture must necessarily be a perfect thing from start to finish. Even if one were to be arrested in the middle of it, it would still be a fine and complete picture.’” Sickert, Menpes recalled, ‘took down every word on his cuff’.³³

By following Whistler’s methods, Sickert – and Menpes with him – hoped to emulate his results. ‘If we etched a plate,’ Menpes remembered, ‘we had to etch it almost exactly on Whistlerian lines. If Whistler kept his plates fair, ours were so fair that they could scarcely be seen. If Whistler adopted economy of means, using the fewest possible lines, we became so nervous that we could scarcely touch the plate lest we should overelaborate.’³⁴ In their paintings they embraced all the key Whistlerian tropes: the same prima method, the same grey grounds, the same restricted range of low tones, the same turpentine-thinned paint, the same simplified forms, and simple compositions. They laid out their paints in the same order as the Master; and – like him – they laid them out on a painting table rather than a palette.³⁵ Their subject matter was, unsurprisingly, the same, since – whenever possible – they worked alongside their master, recording Chelsea street scenes or figures in the studio. It remained something of a conundrum to them that so much patient emulation did not immediately yield more successful results.

Away from the business of making pictures there were other lessons to be gleaned from the Master. Sickert strove to imitate Whistler in everything. He adopted his dandy’s pose: the pleasure of always shocking and of never being shocked. Already handsome and fastidious, Sickert became ‘picturesque’ in his dress.³⁶ He also drank in Whistler’s whole philosophy of art. Over the supper table at the Hogarth Club, Whistler rapped out his ideas – ideas that he had adumbrated in the witness box at the Ruskin trial and had been honing ever since. The established order of Victorian thought was turned upon its head. In place of the accepted Ruskinian ideal that gave critics authority over artists, and set a value upon art according to how much it might ennoble the spirit or improve society through its uplifting subject matter, its fidelity to nature, its painstaking workmanship, Whistler put forward a host of contrary propositions. He asserted the superiority of the artist to the critic, and claimed for art a complete independence from all social and moral obligations. He decried the anecdotal and literary elements in painting. Art, he suggested, should be concerned, not with telling a story, but with formal beauty. It should be made only for art’s sake. Nature he dismissed as the mere raw material of art, requiring the selective genius of the artist to transform it into something beautiful. And, having established to his own satisfaction that Nature was incoherent and subject matter unimportant, it followed that all subjects were equally possible for the artist, and equally desirable. There was even, he suggested, a virtue in selecting the new or overlooked motif, thus extending the range of art. He himself chose to abstract beauty from what was considered the unpromising ground of contemporary London, the humble streets of Chelsea and the dingy, industrial Thames.³⁷

These were intoxicating ideas. Certainly Whistler was delighted with them, and very irritated that Oscar Wilde seemed to have borrowed so many for his American lectures. In his haste to denounce Wilde for picking the plums from his plate he did, however, rather overlook the debt that his own formulations owed to the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, the two French critics of the previous generation who had first elaborated an amoral, anti-natural philosophy of art. Sickert, though he later traced the ideas back to their French origins, in the first instance accepted them as Whistler’s own, and accepted them enthusiastically.³⁸

Whistler was not content merely to spin theories amongst his disciples: he wished to carry his ideas into the camp of the enemy. He has claims to be the first artist in Britain to adopt the now established procedure of seeking to offend the bourgeois public into acquiescence and admiration. His pose was calculated to affront. He courted controversy. He presented himself as opposed by all the forces of the Establishment – and his disciples were eager to accept the truth of this vision. For them, 13 Tite Street had the glamour of a rebel cell. And it was embattled. For the grandees of the Academy such as Millais and Frith, Whistler was – as Sickert recalled – an abomination.³⁹ Many in the press were hostile, and much of the public uncomprehending. But, as he recognized, all publicity was good, and the media were there to be manipulated. Whistler devoted a great deal of time to lighting the fires of new controversies, or fanning the embers of old ones. Sitters would wait for hours in the studio while he ‘polished a little squib’ for the editor of some periodical.⁴⁰

Sickert, with his classical education and literary bent, proved useful in this game. In June 1882, when the Pall Mall Gazette lamented the apparently unfinished state of Whistler’s Scherzo in Blue at the Grosvenor Gallery, it was Sickert, under the soubriquet ‘An Art Student’, who wrote the ‘very convaincu paragraph’ defending Whistler’s ‘artistic sincerity’ and explaining that, on the day of the press view, the picture was indeed unfinished, had only been hung to ‘take up its space on the walls’, and was afterwards removed and completed.⁴¹ It was the first of many such interventions. Over the next decade, Sickert, as he put it, ‘insisted in season and out of season on the excellence and importance of Whistler’s work’ in whatever papers would print his words.⁴² He would also write letters as from Whistler, and even attribute to him bons mots of his own invention – though Whistler did have to discourage him from devising them in Latin and other languages he did not know.⁴³ He also counselled Sickert against too much subtlety. Rather than working away ‘in a ponderous German manner, answering objections, controverting statements of fact with tedious arrays of evidence’, his advice was ‘simply [to] say “Stocking!” Don’t you know? Ha! Ha! That’s it! That’s controversy! “Stocking!” What can they say to that?’⁴⁴

Whistler liked to present himself as a figure ‘sprung completely armed from nowhere’, owning no allegiances and taking no interest in the achievements of others.⁴⁵ Of the old masters he would remark, ‘they are all old but they are not all masters’.⁴⁶ In expansive moments, though, he might acknowledge a few small artistic debts to Velásquez and Canaletto. He admired Hogarth, and condescended to admit Hokusai as an equal. Amongst his contemporaries he saved his appreciation for the English cartoonists and the French Impressionists. Keene he considered the greatest British artist since Hogarth.⁴⁷ Sickert, of course, needed no introduction to Keene’s genius. He knew rather less, however, of the French Impressionists. In England, knowledge was remarkably limited of the work being produced by Manet, Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and the other painters who, since the mid 1870s, had been exhibiting in Paris under the ‘Impressionist’ banner. The very word ‘Impressionism’ had only just made it across the Channel, but there was still much doubt as to what it signified. To the English critical establishment, Impressionism, as far as it meant anything, meant Whistler,⁴⁸ and this was probably a view that Sickert shared on his arrival at Tite Street. His time there, however, gave him the chance to discover rather more.

Whistler, as his English critics asserted, did have strong links with the movement. He knew all the protagonists well from his time in Paris. Degas had invited him to show in the exhibition at Nadar’s studio in 1874 that gave the Impressionists their name. Though he had declined the invitation, it had not broken the association. In the early 1870s he had exhibited in Paris with Durand-Ruel, the dealer who was championing and promoting Degas, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro. His art shared several of the concerns and tropes of the French Impressionists: modern urban subject matter, simplification of detail, an attempt to capture the effects of light (or, in Whistler’s case, darkness), and an unconcern with academic finish. Sickert had a first chance to assess such similarities and gauge their depth in the spring of 1882. That May, Durand-Ruel exhibited a selection of work by Degas, Monet, and others at White’s Gallery in King Street, St James’s. Sickert visited the show and was greatly impressed. He liked particularly Degas’ painting, Baisser de Rideau, an enthusiasm that shocked Burne-Jones, who was baffled that anyone should either paint or praise ‘the fag end of a ballet’.⁴⁹

That summer, Sickert made an important French connection of his own. Fantin-Latour was in town again, and Sickert went with Scholderer to call on him in Golden Square, at the house of his London agent Mrs Edwin Edwards. He had been sent by Whistler in the hope of persuading Fantin to visit Tite Street. The mission was unsuccessful (Fantin pleaded ill health), but the call was not without profit. In Mrs Edwards’ drawing room Sickert was introduced to another visiting Frenchman, a young painter of his own age called Jacques-Émile Blanche. Blanche, the only son of a highly successful Parisian doctor, was over in London with his ‘mentor’, Edmond Maître, attending a season of Wagner operas.⁵⁰ Sickert liked Blanche at once. Unlike Fantin, he was keen to meet Whistler, and it was arranged that he should attend the next Sunday breakfast party.

Over the following week they saw more of each other.⁵¹ Blanche even extended his stay so that he could cross over to Dieppe with Sickert – who was taking Ellen there, probably along with the rest of his family, for the holidays. Blanche rather rued this act of courtesy when he caught a chill on the crossing and was unable to go on to Bayreuth for the premiere of Parsifal as he had planned. His misfortune, however, did mean that the friendship begun in London could continue and ripen further over the summer.⁵²

It was to prove one of the most productive and enduring of all Sickert’s friendships. Sickert relished Blanche’s intelligence, his worldliness, his knowledge of contemporary art, his genius for gossip, his helpfulness, his passion for painting. Blanche opened up for Sickert a new side of Dieppe life. His family’s house, the Bas Fort Blanc, a hideous half-timbered villa in the modern ‘Norman’ style, was a centre of intellectual and artistic life. Sickert spent time in Blanche’s studio room, which had been decorated with scenes from Tannhäuser by Renoir – indeed Renoir was staying just up the coast and was also an occasional visitor.⁵³ Even if Sickert did not meet him, he certainly heard of his doings from Blanche. It was a further taste of the Impressionist milieu.

Through Blanche, Sickert met Olga, daughter of the Duchesse de Caracciolo, whose villa abutted the Bas Fort Blanc. Olga, though barely into her teens, already possessed a dreamy, fawn-like beauty dominated by great almond eyes set in a pale face. The question of who her father might be remained a matter of excited debate amongst the English and French communities (the Duchesse had numerous lovers and admirers). Many liked to promote the claims of the Prince of Wales. He was the girl’s godfather; might he not be her father too?⁵⁴ Sickert was amused by such tales, and struck by Olga’s peculiar grace. They established a happy, and in due course flirtatious, friendship.⁵⁵

Sickert returned to London exhilarated. He was, as Maggie Cobden reported, ‘blooming’.⁵⁶ Under Whistler’s tutelage he had at last discovered an outlet for his energies. Not that he was entirely free from constraints. He still had no source of income, and perhaps it was to earn money that he undertook several days’ work for E. W. Godwin, researching historical costume designs at the British Museum.⁵⁷ And it may have been for the same reason that, later in the year, he gave some home tuition to the children of Henry Irving.⁵⁸

If things were going well for him, they were faring poorly for Nellie. She was ill again in the autumn, suffering what seems to have been a regular seasonal relapse.⁵⁹ She went down to Margate to recuperate, lodging in the smart Cliftonville area of the town.⁶⁰ Sickert visited her there and loved the place. The Kentish resort with its mid-Victorian flavour, its bracing seawater baths and no less bracing taint of cockney vulgarity – not to mention its associations with Turner – became one of his favoured sites. It also proved beneficial for Nellie. She rallied enough to return to London by the end of the year and throw herself into arrangements for the Suffrage Ball in the coming spring.⁶¹

Sickert had his own arranging to do. All his time was taken up with the preparations for Whistler’s forthcoming exhibition at the Fine Art Society, a second showing of Venice etchings.⁶² There was a mad dash to get everything ready on time. For Sickert, it was an accelerated apprenticeship in the art of printing, as Whistler, through selective inking and wiping and other tricks of the trade, strove to imbue each individual print with its own unique character. The work, though hard, was not without its moments of humour. Sickert recalled once dropping the copper plate he was working on. “‘How like you!” said Whistler. Five minutes afterwards the improbable happened. Whistler, who was never clumsy, dropped one himself. There was a pause. “How unlike me!”’*⁶³ In their work they were distracted by the reappearance of Oscar Wilde, who returned from his American tour at the beginning of January 1883 and was much at Tite Street, before he headed off at the end of the month to spend his earnings on a three-month stay in Paris.⁶⁴

Despite such diversions, all was ready for the show’s opening on 17 February. For Whistler, an exhibition was not merely a gathering of pictures but a quasi-theatrical event. Every detail had to be addressed. An ‘amazing’ catalogue was produced that quoted some of his critics’ most hostile comments, and the Fine Art Society was redecorated in shades of yellow. For the private view the colour scheme extended to the flowers, the assistants’ neckties, and even Whistler’s socks.⁶⁵ It is not known what sartorial concession Sickert made to the occasion, but he was, of course, there. He introduced Brandon Thomas to Whistler, and was thrilled when the actor commissioned a painting from his master.⁶⁶

The opening of the show brought Sickert relief from his studio duties. He was, as his mother put it, ‘somewhat free again and able to get on with his own work’.⁶⁷ Inspired by Whistler’s example he began to etch his own series of London scenes.† And though he continued to attend regularly at Tite Street, he took a room nearby at 38 Markham Square in order to have some measure of independence.⁶⁸

Whistler was not entirely approving. He soon found new work for his pupil to do. At the end of April he entrusted Sickert with the task of escorting his painting Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother over to Paris for exhibition at the Salon. Besides the picture, Sickert also took with him copies of the ‘amazing’ catalogue and letters of introduction to Manet and Degas. He was to say to them that Whistler, too, was ‘amazing’. The route was via Dieppe. Sickert retained a clear recollection of ‘the little deal case’ containing his precious charge being hoisted from the hold of the boat and ‘swinging from a crane against the starlit night and the sleeping houses of the Pollet’.⁶⁹ In Paris, he lodged at the Hôtel Voltaire as the guest of Oscar Wilde, to whom he had also been instructed to show the catalogue. ‘Remember,’ Whistler informed Wilde in a covering note, ‘he travels no longer as Walter Sickert – of course he is amazing – for does he not represent the Amazing One.’⁷⁰ Such magisterial condescension was not entirely apt. Sickert, naturally gifted with a remarkable degree of social confidence, had learnt even more poise at Tite Street. He was no mere cipher.

Having seen Whistler’s painting safely delivered to the Salon, he called on Manet but found the artist too ill to receive visitors. Standing in the hallway of the painter’s flat, Sickert only heard his voice, ‘through the open door of his bedroom’, as he instructed his brother, Eugene, to take ‘Whistler’s friend round to my studio and show him my pictures’.⁷¹ Although Sickert left no contemporary record of the visit, he was certainly impressed by what he saw. Manet’s large painting of the bar of the Folies Bergère was there, though Sickert’s most vivid memories were of a pastel portrait of the Irish writer George Moore, and a picture showing ‘Rochefort’s escape from New Caledonia’. He came away with a general impression of freshness, vitality, and excellence. He recognized Manet’s affinities with Whistler – his debt to Velásquez, his freshness of touch, his command of the prima method of painting. And though, such was his loyalty, he hesitated to rank him with ‘the Master’, he acknowledged him as ‘a brilliant and powerful’ artist, an ‘executant of the first rank’.⁷²

Sickert called next on Degas at his flat in rue Pigalle. It was to prove a momentous meeting. Degas was then forty-eight. A crusty bachelor with an acerbic wit, he was developing a reputation as a curmudgeon, if not a recluse. There were few artists in Paris who were not a little scared of him and of his sharp-edged tongue. Sickert, if he knew anything of this, was undaunted by it. Many years later, he gave an account of his visit through what he described as the ‘piquant distorting media’ of Oscar Wilde’s recollection of Degas’ story of the incident:

Degas alleged himself to have been disturbed too early in the morning, by a terrific knocking, and ringing. He had opened the door himself, his head tied up in a flannel comforter. ‘Here at last,’ he said to himself, ‘is the Englishman who is going to buy all my pictures’. ‘Monsieur’, he had said, ‘je ne peux pas vous recevoir. J’ai une bronchite qui me mène au diable. Je regrette’. ‘Cela ne fait rien’, the Englishman is here made to say. ‘Je n’aime pas la conversation. Je viens voir vos tableaux. Je suis l’élève de Whistler. Je vous présente le catalogue de mon maître’ … The visitor had then entered, and proceeded, silently, and with great deliberation to examine all the pictures in the flat, and the wax statuettes under their glass cases, keeping the invalid standing the while, and had ended by ‘Bien. Très bien. Je vous donne rendezvous demain à votre atelier à dix heures’.

The facts, Sickert admitted, were ‘singularly exact’.⁷³

Sickert, true to his intention, followed up the call with a visit to Degas’ studio in the rue Fontaine St Georges. The artist’s consternation at his assured young visitor seems to have quickly dissolved into amusement. Degas’ ‘rollicking and somewhat bear-like sense of fun’ came to the fore. It became his joke to regard Sickert as ‘the typical and undiluted’ Englishman, the authority on all matters of English life and etiquette. He bombarded him with stories of other Englishmen he had known and the foolish things they had said, and quizzed him upon points of national custom. But Degas must have recognized, too, Sickert’s real interest in art, and they found common ground in their admiration of Charles Keene.⁷⁴

Sickert was amazed to discover the high regard in which Keene was held by the French Impressionists, several of whom, he learnt, preserved collections of his work cut from the pages of Punch ‘as models of style’.⁷⁵ To them, he was ‘the first of the moderns’.⁷⁶ Fascinated by his command of chiaroscuro, they regarded him as a fellow ‘painter’, rather than as a draughtsman.⁷⁷ They were as interested in his backgrounds as his figures, praising his depiction of landscape – ‘his snowy streets, his seascapes, his bits of country life’ – as ‘unequalled’.⁷⁸ Monet and Sisley, Sickert was told, derived their handling of trees in sunlight directly from Keene’s drawings of the ‘rampant foliage’ of London squares and country gardens.⁷⁹ Keene saw things ‘never seen before’; he observed the reflected lights in the shadows and depicted them in lines drawn with diluted ink.⁸⁰ These revelations reinforced Sickert’s appreciation of his hero, and reinforced, too, his understanding of the dynamic relation between drawing and painting.

It was a relationship that Sickert could trace in Degas’ own work. He drank in all that was on view: the ballet scenes, the studies of millinery shops, the figure drawings. There were points of contact with Whistler’s art – the engagement with scenes of modern urban life, the fascination with low tone – but there was also the hint of something new: the unconscious drama of people in interiors, the conscious drama of the popular stage, the effects of artificial light, and the sense of pictures not conjured out of paint but built up, planned, and composed in stages from drawings and studies. The full significance of such differences was not at once apparent to Sickert. For the moment it was enough to know that he liked Degas’ pictures, and that Degas seemed to like him.

The trip to Paris gave Sickert a broadening sense of French art, and of the Impressionists.⁸¹ This process of education continued back in England. Durand-Ruel held another exhibition in London that spring,⁸² and Whistler began having sittings from Théodore Duret, a successful wine merchant who was also the champion and friend of the Impressionists. Sickert worked alongside Whistler, producing his own small portrait sketch of the bearded Duret, and learning more of Manet, Degas, and their contemporaries.⁸³

Through much of 1883, Ellen continued to be troubled by her ailments. Her younger sister, Annie, had already beaten her to the registry office (marrying T. J. Sanderson, a reluctant lawyer, would-be bookbinder, and disciple of William Morris),⁸⁴ and it was becoming increasingly clear that her own wedding, planned for that summer, would have to be postponed. Ellen did not join Walter and the rest of his family for a late holiday at St Ives.

Thanks to the arrival of the railway, the little Cornish fishing village was already becoming a magnet for artists and holidaymakers. Amongst the families on the beach that year was Leslie Stephen with his wife, young son, and two daughters – Virginia and Vanessa. Although Sickert thought Mr Stephen looked enormously ‘impressive’ and Mrs Stephen quite ‘superb’, he did not attempt to make their acquaintance.⁸⁵ It was the real life of the place that drew his attention rather than its artistic and holiday existence. He assumed a jersey and top boots and ‘completely won over’ the local fishermen, ‘fascinating them with his kindly bonhomie’.⁸⁶

He did, nevertheless, do some pictures, amongst them a charming little panel of some children sitting on the beach, which in its lightness and brightness – as well as its novel accent upon the figures – perhaps owed something to his recent Parisian discoveries. (Sickert gave the picture to his housekeeper at Markham Square, to show her that he was not completely wedded to the tones of what she called ‘London Mud’.)⁸⁷ To be out sketching on the beach was to be amongst fellow artists, and Sickert found himself engaged in conversation with a young painter called Alberto Ludovici. Ludovici was the son of a well-known artist of the same name, and, although still only in his twenties, he had been drawn into the art establishment. Already he was a member of the Society of British Artists, a prestigious if rather stuffy group and a would-be nursery to the Royal Academy, of which his father was treasurer. Young Ludovici was interested to meet a pupil of the infamous Whistler, while Sickert was intrigued to meet a man so well connected to the art institutions of the capital. They parted in the expectation of seeing each other again in London.⁸⁸

At the end of the summer, when the holiday visitors returned to town, Sickert stayed on and was joined by Whistler and Menpes for a winter painting tour. They all lodged with an old lady in Barnoon Terrace, overlooking the harbour. The rooms – in the universal style of seaside boarding houses – were crowded with overstuffed chairs and ‘aggressive’ ornaments. But even these aesthetic affronts were unable to quash Whistler’s enthusiasm for St Ives, for the seascapes, the boats, and the fishermen. The gentle pace of the holiday season evaporated at once. Whistler had to complete a series of pictures for a planned exhibition early in the New Year at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in Bond Street. He was up at dawn each morning eager for work, delivering ‘reproaches, instructions, taunts and commands’ to his tardy followers. Sickert would often be roused by the noise of Whistler outside his room complaining, ‘Walter, you are in a condition of drivel. There you are, sleeping away your very life! What’s it all about.’ The tone of these complaints became sharper during the course of the stay. Whistler was considerably put out to discover that Sickert was already a favoured personage about the little town and that the fishermen all received him as a ‘a pal’ – indeed presented him, almost daily, with fish from their catch. Sickert gave these trophies to the landlady and as a consequence she, too, held him in very high favour. Whistler, with an irritation that was not completely put on, considered this to be an inversion of the proper order of things. He complained peevishly to Menpes that, as the Master, he – rather than Sickert – should be the recipient of any gifts. Menpes did his best to console him, explaining, not entirely accurately, that Sickert had visited St Ives in his acting days and had a long-established connection with the fishermen of the place.⁸⁹

Despite these minor ructions, a daily routine was established. The three men would set off to paint each morning (after a cooked breakfast – often of fish provided by Sickert), armed with their pochade boxes, their grey-tinted panels, and walking canes. Many of the other artists they encountered could not believe that they intended to do serious work with so little equipment. Most of the painters who gravitated to St Ives during the 1880s were inspired by a strain of realism that they saw as being derived from Courbet and his disciple Bastien-Lepage. While Whistler and his pupils worked on a tiny scale, capturing fugitive impressions of land and sea, they sought to record the scenes and settings of contemporary rural life by painting large, often highly detailed pictures direct from nature. It was a taxing business for the local peasantry who had to ‘pose’ for these scenes, and for the artists who had to work long hours in the open air. Sickert delighted in the memory of one artist who required four fishermen to hold down his easel and canvas with ropes while he worked away in a howling gale.⁹⁰

While Menpes stuck close to Whistler, Sickert ‘almost invariably went off by himself’ for most of the day. But this apparent independence of spirit was tempered by the fact that the paintings he made – ‘sometimes five or six a day’ – were thoroughly Whistlerian in approach and execution.⁹¹ Sickert remained in awe of his master’s handling of the Cornish scenes. Indeed he came to regard Whistler’s pochades – done from life or immediate memory – as his real masterpieces: ‘No sign of effort, with immense result.’ It was, Sickert recognized, ‘the admirable preliminary order of his mind, the perfect peace at which his art was with itself, that enabled him to aim at and bring down quarry which, to anyone else, would have seemed intangible and altogether elusive’.⁹² At times, Whistler seemed almost able to command nature. A wave that he was painting appeared to Sickert to ‘hang, dog’s eared for him, for an incredible duration of seconds, while the foam creamed and curled under his brush’.⁹³ Sickert strove to achieve the same mastery, and Whistler encouraged his efforts, giving him a ‘minute nocturne in watercolour’ that he painted as a demonstration piece from a scene they had all studied together.⁹⁴

The party remained in Cornwall till January 1884. It was, in Menpes’ recollection, a ‘simple happy time’. There were occasional respites from work: days spent fishing from the rocks, with Whistler springing nimbly about in his patent leather pumps. During the long winter evenings there was scope for talk and discussion. Whistler had a chance to refine his ideas on Nature (‘a poor creature after all – as I have often told you – poor company certainly – and artistically, often offensive’).⁹⁵ He also began to evolve plans for the future. Sickert’s chance encounter with Alberto Ludovici seems to have awakened a curiosity in Whistler about the Society of British Artists. He was fifty and still an outsider. Contemporaries such as Leighton and Poynter had achieved established positions at the Royal Academy. What, he began to consider, might he not accomplish with the structure and weight of an institution behind him?

Once back in London, Sickert called on Ludovici and mentioned to him Whistler’s interest in perhaps becoming a member of the SBA. This ‘surprised’ Ludovici, but also intrigued him.⁹⁶ The society was in a sad way: membership was falling; the most recent exhibition had been so poorly attended as to gain a reputation amongst young couples as a ‘most convenient and quiet spot for “spooning”’.⁹⁷ Whistler’s membership would certainly attract publicity. Sickert introduced his master to Ludovici, who – suitably impressed – began to canvas the SBA committee on his behalf. The members had plenty of opportunity for assessing Whistler’s work. It was much before the public that spring. His exhibition of ‘Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes’ (many of them done at St Ives) opened at Dowdeswell’s in May with the usual fanfare and the usual ‘amazing’ catalogue.

The work that Sickert had produced in Cornwall over the winter, though not publicly exhibited, was also seen. He had taken a new studio at 13 Edwardes Square, just around the corner from Pembroke Gardens. As his mother reported proudly, ‘several people whose opinions are worth hearing’ had been there and pronounced his work ‘very good & promising’.⁹⁸ Théodore Duret and Jacques-Émile Blanche were both in town and were very probably amongst the visitors. And if they came, it is more than likely that they brought with them their friend, the art-loving Irish novelist George Moore.

Moore, then in his early thirties, was an extraordinary figure. Sickert had already seen the pastel portrait of him at Manet’s studio and so was familiar with the tall blond apparition: the long colourless face, bulbous eyes, and orange-tinged whiskers. There seemed something sub-aquatic about Moore. He was likened amongst other things to a codfish and a drowned fisherman. But he was an ardent lover of painting and France, as well as of literature and – so he was always bragging – women. He had lived in Paris for much of the 1870s and had even studied art there before embracing literature as his vocation. He had fraternized with the painters and poets of Montmartre and the Rive Gauche, and it was his proud boast that he had received his education over the marble-topped tables at the Nouvelle Athens – a café in the place Pigalle, where his tutors had been Manet and Degas. Along with his absinthe he had drunk in a knowledge of all the new literary and artistic movements that crackled across the Parisian cultural scene: Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, Symbolism.

In his own literary experiments Moore had veered from a flirtation with sub-Baudelarian decadence (he wrote a volume of hot-house verse and claimed to have kept a pet python) to a bracing commitment to brutal naturalism à la Zola. In his artistic sympathies, however, he remained true to the Impressionists. Though living in London, he returned often to Paris and continued to see Degas and Duret – Degas admired him, and told Sickert that he was ‘very intelligent’.⁹⁹ When Manet died, Moore bought two paintings from his widow and continued to keep in touch with the evolving scene.¹⁰⁰

In 1883 Moore had published a novel, A Modern Lover, that dealt with a fictionalized version of the British art world. The anti-hero, Lewis Seymour, a sort of debased version of the hugely successful Lawrence Alma-Tadema, compromises his artistic integrity (and a succession of women) to devote himself to producing trite, but eminently saleable, classical nudes. His dégringolade is contrasted with the career of another painter – Thompson – leader of ‘the Moderns’. Thompson is an artist who depicts ‘acrobats’ and ‘bar girls’ for ‘his own heart’s praise, and for that of the little band of artists that surround him’. But, after years of struggle and neglect, he achieves success, partly through the canny speculations of his dealer, Mr Bendish. The story was clearly – in part – a transposition of Moore’s French experiences into an English setting. Thompson was a composite of Manet and Degas. The ‘Moderns’ were the Impressionists, and Mr Bendish was based upon Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had promoted them. In England there was, as yet, no comparable group: Whistler still stood alone. Nor was there a dealer, like Durand-Ruel, ready to back such a movement. These were gaps that Moore regretted, and that his book pointed up.¹⁰¹

Sickert certainly took note, even if he did not immediately embrace Moore’s vision. In the spring of 1884 the influence and example of Whistler’s work remained paramount. Sickert was still engrossed in making sketchy etchings in the style of Whistler of London courts and thoroughfares. At the end of May, when he went down to Ramsgate, where Ellen was staying with her sisters, it was with the Whistleresque intention of doing ‘some seas’;¹⁰² and on a visit to his old Munich friends the Fowlers at Broadway, in Worcestershire, he made pictures of corn stooks and rural slums.¹⁰³ It was only in August, when he joined the rest of the family in Dieppe, that he seems to have taken stock. He produced a small etching of the circus rider Leah Pinder. It was his first attempt at depicting a popular theatrical subject – such as Degas (or ‘Thompson’) might have tackled.¹⁰⁴

Back in London after the summer, Sickert discovered Tite Street in a state of upheaval. Whistler had taken a lease on a new purpose-built studio at the top of the Fulham Road. He was also looking for a new home. (He and Maud, though their relationship was deteriorating, eventually settled on a house in The Vale, a little rus-in-urbe cul-de-sac off the King’s Road.) In the midst of these practical arrangements the business of his election to the SBA was coming to a head. The committee was still nervous, but Sickert acted to assure Ludovici as to Whistler’s good faith and he, in turn, swayed the havering committee members.¹⁰⁵ On 21 November Whistler was duly elected, just in time to lend the cachet of his name and work to the society’s winter exhibition. It was not necessary to be a member in order to submit work for the show and Sickert, following in his master’s wake, sent in his small ‘portrait sketch’ of Théodore Duret, which was accepted. The debt to Whistler was apparent in both the picture’s style and its subject.¹⁰⁶

Whistler’s appearance in the ranks of the Society of British Artists created consternation amongst the public, and excitement amongst his followers. The circle of Whistler’s young disciples had been growing. Sydney Starr, an accomplished and rather dashing painter from Hull (and a former room-mate of Brandon Thomas’s), became a regular at the studio, as did William Stott, who had recently returned from several years’ studying and working in France.¹⁰⁷ A Canadian-born artist, Elizabeth Armstrong, then living in London with her mother, also gravitated to Whistler’s circle, anxious to learn more about etching.¹⁰⁸ For Sickert, Menpes, Harper Pennington, and the other established followers, these were new friends and allies. Their common enthusiasm for Whistler – and their common ambition to exhibit alongside him at the SBA’s gallery in Suffolk Street – obliterated, for the moment, all rivalries.

They banded together into what Sickert called ‘the school’ of Whistler.¹⁰⁹ They met at each other’s studios, and dined together at cheap restaurants.¹¹⁰ They discussed the Master, his works, and his methods. They undertook to fight his battles and to promote his name. They had, too, their own ambitions. ‘Severally and collectively,’ Menpes recalled, ‘we intended to be great.’¹¹¹ But it was not to be an ordinary greatness. They despised their more conventional artistic contemporaries, those ‘young men of the eighties’, as Sickert later characterized them, ‘admirably tailored with nothing of Vandyck about them but the beard, playing billiards for dear life with the Academicians at the Minerva Club!’¹¹² Their greatness was to be achieved by following the precepts of Whistler; and Sickert, as a designated ‘pupil’ of the Master, was placed right at the heart of this unfolding project.

In the New Year he assisted with the next phase of the Master’s planned assault on the established art world: the Ten o’Clock Lecture. Jealous of Wilde’s successes on the platform, Whistler had determined to mount a lecture event of his own, and Richard D’Oyly Carte, the promoter of Wilde’s American tour, had agreed to produce it. Whistler worked hard arranging his argument and polishing his paradoxes, and Sickert worked hard with him. Some manuscript sheets of the lecture survive in Sickert’s hand, suggesting how active his role was.¹¹³ He also played a part in the practical arrangements, liaising with D’Oyly Carte’s assistant (and later wife) Helen Lenoir. He visited her office many times, and amidst the demands of work even found time to produce an ambitious etching of her sitting at her lamp-lit desk poring over her paperwork.¹¹⁴ When the lecture was given at Prince’s Hall on the evening of 20 February 1885, Sickert caught some of the reflected glory. His significant contribution to the event was certainly recognized by Ernest Brown of the Fine Art Society and Mr Buck of the Goupil Gallery. They invited him to lunch, together with Whistler, in gratitude for a ‘much enjoyed’ evening.¹¹⁵

Whistler was in the ascendant and Sickert rose with him. The portrait that Whistler had made of the Spanish violin virtuoso Sarasate was the main attraction of the SBA’s spring exhibition. At the same show, Sickert exhibited no fewer than four pictures – a view of Ramsgate, two Cornish scenes, and a small flower piece.¹¹⁶ There was, of course, danger as well as opportunity in the association. Critics, although gradually accustoming themselves to taking Whistler seriously, found it convenient to do so at the expense of his imitators and disciples. And the throng of these was ever increasing. Artists beyond the close coterie of Whistler’s studio were beginning to adopt his manner – or, more often, his mannerisms. ‘The power of strong artistic personality,’ remarked the critic from The Academy, ‘has probably never been more plainly shown at an English exhibition than at the present collection in Suffolk Street. Mr Whistler is not only there in force, but the effect of his influence on the younger exhibitors is very plain.’ It was considered a not entirely beneficial force: ‘You can have too much Whistler and Water.’¹¹⁷ Following the same line, the Pall Mall Gazette thought Whistler’s little landscapes ‘vastly amusing’ in themselves, but ‘so bad for the young’. Menpes alone was excused from this general criticism.¹¹⁸ As a further mark of distinction, the Australian was also the first disciple whom Whistler sought to bring with him into the SBA. He was elected at the beginning of June as a ‘member in water colour’.¹¹⁹

These incidents served to remind Sickert how much he still had to achieve. He also began to perceive that the pleasure of being one of the ‘young lions of the butterfly’ was touched with the possibility of being lumped together with various inferior talents. In what was perhaps an attempt to raise himself above the crowd of Whistlerian ‘imitators’, he allowed himself to look beyond the confines of Suffolk Street. That summer he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy with his etching of Miss Lenoir. Along with Menpes he also showed at the Society of Painter-Etchers – a body of which Whistler disapproved (its president was his brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, with whom he had fallen out). The move can hardly have been made without Whistler’s permission, but it marked a first small assertion of self-will. Significantly, he chose to show an etching of young Stephen Manuel that he had made while the boy was sitting to Whistler. ‘My etching was good for me,’ Sickert recalled, ‘being done in once. Whistler’s portrait was bad for him. He was not quick enough for the child, who was wearied with the number of sittings.’ Sickert, with a cheerful presumption of equality, had then told Whistler of his theory ‘that when two people painted from the same thing, the bogey of success sat on one or the other, but not on both palettes’.¹²⁰

Although Sickert’s identification with Whistler’s aims and methods remained intense, he began to put forward his own ideas as to how they might best be effected. It was probably apropos the Stephen Manuel portrait that he wrote to his master, urging, ‘[For God’s] sake don’t attempt to repaint the whole picture to [the] boy’s present condition, but merely touch details. The picture is finished.’ The problems of reworking the entire surface of a large canvas at each sitting – putting one layer of paint on another – also inspired Sickert to make independent experiments. ‘I have tried the petroleum oil on the life-size canvas,’ he wrote excitedly to Whistler of one new paint recipe: ‘it is perfect: not sticky like turps: keeps wet: doesn’t sink in: works quicker somehow, and fresher: five of it to one of burnt oil. I wish you would try it.’¹²¹ The tone of self-assurance was new but unmistakable.

* Whistler addressed a series of disparaging open letters to Wilde during the course of the year: ‘We, of Tite Street and Beaufort Gardens [home of Mrs Jopling-Rowe], joy in your triumphs and delight in your success; but we are of opinion that, with the exception of your epigrams, you talk like “S[idney] C[olvin] [the Slade Professor] in the provinces”; and that, with the exception of your knee-breeches, you dress like ‘Arry Quilter.’

* Sickert was not habitually clumsy. Many contemporaries recall the precision – and decision – of his movements. If he did drop things around Whistler it must have been the result of nervous over-excitement.

† Amongst the views recorded were several of St John’s Wood, where Ellen was staying at 10a Cunningham Place, in a house occupied by Miss Leigh-Smith, and the painter, Miss E. M. Osborn.

III RELATIVE VALUES

I know that the Sickerts can’t expect other people to see in Dieppe all that it means to them.

(Oswald Valentine Sickert to Eddie Marsh)

It was as an exhibiting artist with pictures hanging in three London galleries that Sickert finally married Ellen Cobden on Wednesday 10 June 1885 at Marylebone Registry Office. He was twenty-five, she was thirty-six. The occasion appears to have been a low-key, almost impromptu affair. According to legend, Sickert nearly missed the service waiting for his bus to come.¹ It is not clear that either family was represented – though both were certainly well pleased with the match.² Mrs Sickert considered Ellen (or ‘Nellie-Walter’ as she became known in the family, to differentiate her from all the other Nellies) ‘delightful’ and ‘so good & loving to me that she always does me good’.³ Whistler, too, was supportive, presenting the happy pair with a wedding gift of a luxurious green-and-white wardrobe painted by himself.⁴ The prolonged engagement, however, if it had not weakened Sickert’s real affection, had done nothing to raise the temperature of his passion. Three years of waiting had established a pattern to the relationship, increasing Sickert’s sense of independence, and accustoming him to the security of Ellen’s affections and support, while leaving him often at liberty to pursue his own interests, both in work and at play. The bohemian world of the Chelsea studios had often drawn him away from her, and it seems that, even before the marriage, Sickert had begun to have affairs. It was not a pattern he was anxious to break.*⁵

To many of their friends, the Walter Sickerts seemed a less than obvious pairing. The journalist Herbert Vivian, who met them soon after their marriage, considered that there never had been ‘such an improbable ménage’ as the ‘conventional’ Ellen and the unconventional Walter.⁶ Blanche thought them more like brother and sister than husband and wife.⁷ Yet they appear to have been happy. They were united by a common interest in Walter’s career and a belief in his talent. Superficially, Ellen made his life comfortable, and he made hers exciting. But there was more. Sickert was capable of great kindness: he nursed Ellen when she was ill,⁸ and he made several tender, almost sentimental, portraits of her.⁹ And from the evidence of Ellen’s partially autobiographical novel, Wistons, it would seem that there were moments of ‘exquisite passion’ in the first days of their marriage.¹⁰ Certainly the romantic conventions were not entirely ignored, and after the wedding they departed for a honeymoon in Europe.¹¹

By the height of the season they were at Dieppe. From 19 August they took ‘a dear little house’ in the rue Sygogne, a narrow street running up from the Front, just behind the Casino.¹² They were in good spirits. Sickert, in his new role as the young husband, had grown a trim pointed beard and moustache and was looking conspicuously smart. (Blanche was amused to note the extent to which the Cobden connection seemed to have ‘helped palliate’ his ‘bohemianism’.¹³) The newlyweds found a cast of friends and relatives assembled and assembling. Sickert’s parents and siblings were installed nearby.¹⁴ Dorothy Richmond, over again from New Zealand, came to stay at the rue Sygogne, as did Ellen’s sister Jane.¹⁵ Whistler was expected later in September. John Lemoinne, the distinguished editor of the Journal des Débats, was also in town with his three daughters. Lemoinne had known Richard Cobden and was anxious to make Ellen’s acquaintance. At the Bas Fort Blanc, Blanche had gathered together a trio of rising young painters – Paul Helleu, Rafael de Ochoa, and Henri Gervex, while the next-door villa, ‘Les Rochers’, had been taken by the popular librettist Ludovic Halévy and his family – an aged mother, pious sister, wife, and two young sons – Elie and Daniel. The Halévys had two house guests: Albert Boulanger-Cavé (a former Minister of the Fine Arts under Louis Philippe), and – as Walter ‘learned with delight’ – Edgar Degas.¹⁶

Degas’ presence animated the whole party and gave to the five households a common bond of interest. The assembled company passed a happy month together in great intimacy.¹⁷ Everyone loved Degas. They listened to his stories and went along with his jokes.¹⁸ Ellen found him ‘perfectly delightful’.¹⁹ Young Oswald Valentine Sickert felt that he should ‘never forget the gentleness and charm of his personality’.²⁰ The great artist was in holiday mood that summer – playful, communicative, and at ease. He posed for a series of humorous photographic tableaux, commissioned from the indigent local photographer, Walter Barnes: one of them was a pastiche of Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer, with Degas taking the central role, flanked by the Halévy sons and the Lemoinne daughters.²¹ He also developed an unexpected tendresse for Ellen’s sister Jane. When she had to return early to England Degas was one of the party that leapt into a small boat to be ferried across the port in order that they might wave her off. He subsequently remarked to Ellen, ‘We have all such an admiration for your sister that we are jealous of one another.’²²

One of Sickert’s abiding memories of Degas that summer was that he was ‘always humming with enthusiasm’ airs from Ernest Reyer’s popular opera Sigurd. He had seen the piece over thirty times since its opening in 1884 (his attendance rate had been helped by the fact that he had been granted the privilege of free entry to the Opera earlier that year), but it is tempting to suppose that his choice of it was in part prompted by the homophony between Sickert and Sigurd.²³ Certainly Degas did pay the occasional musical tribute to his young friend, referring to him as ‘le jeune et beau Sickert’, in a phrase adapted from the song about ‘le jeune et beau Dunois’.²⁴ It was a telling mark of the real amity that grew up between them. The rapport established over those first meetings in Paris two years earlier was built upon. There is an informal photograph of the pair: Sickert standing beside his hero, eager, happy, and alert, with pointed beard, paint box, and straw hat. Degas, as Fantin-Latour had observed to Sickert, was ‘un personnage trop enseignant’ (a too ‘teaching’ personage),²⁵ but this was a quality exactly calculated to appeal to an ambitious young painter, thirsty for knowledge. They went about together, Sickert imbibing all that he could of Degas’ ‘teaching’. On one informal sketching expedition, made together with Blanche, Helleu, and some others into the fields behind the castle, Degas said something that Sickert considered of ‘sufficient importance never to be forgotten’: ‘“I always tried,” he said, “to urge my colleagues to seek for new combinations along the path of draughtsmanship, which I consider a more fruitful field than that of colour. But they wouldn’t listen to me, and have gone the other way”.’ This observation, Sickert noted, was made ‘not at all as a grievance, but rather as a hint of advice to us’. The exact meaning of the hint, if not immediately clear, returned Sickert to the idea that drawing might be the key to painting.²⁶

Sickert also had the chance to watch Degas at work, when he posed as one of a portrait group that Degas made at Blanche’s studio. Working in pastel, Degas began by drawing Sickert, standing in his covert coat at the edge of the group, looking, as it were, off stage. Then he ‘gradually added’ one figure after another – Boulanger-Cavé, Ludovic Halévy, Gervex, Blanche, and Daniel Halévy – each figure ‘growing on to the next in a series of eclipses, and serving, in its turn, as a point de repère for each further accretion’.²⁷ It was a mode of approach that related to the theory of drawing that Sickert had already learnt at Tite Street. Other aspects of Degas’ practice were, however, less familiar to the pupil of Whistler. When they had first taken up their pose, Ludovic Halévy had pointed out to Degas that the collar of Sickert’s coat was half turned up. He was about to adjust it when Degas called out: ‘“Laissez. C’est bien.” Halévy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Degas cherche toujours l’accident”.’²⁸ On another occasion, during a rest in proceedings, Degas invited Gervex (then a young man under thirty) to come and inspect the work in progress. As Sickert recalled the moment, Gervex,

in the most natural manner in the world, advance[d] to the sacred easel, and, after a moment or two of plumbing and consideration, point[ed] out a suggestion. The greatest living draughtsman resumed his position at the easel, plumbed for himself, and, in the most natural manner in the world, accepted the correction. I understood on that day, once for all, the proper relation between youth and age. I understood that in art, as in science, youth and age are equal. I understood that they both stand equally corrected before a fact.²⁹

Sickert was not yet quite confident of his own command of the ‘facts’, but he felt that he was advancing in accomplishment.

He strove to impress Degas with his dedication to work. Ignoring the claims of the holiday season – to say nothing of the honeymoon – he would set off each day armed with his pochade box to record the beach and the town.³⁰ It was a very productive summer. Inspired by Degas’ electrifying presence, Sickert found himself painting with a new fluency and confidence, ‘running in’, as he put it, ‘without conscious operation’. It was ‘an astounding difference’.³¹ All things seemed possible. Though he did attempt some larger works (which he left hanging out of the windows to dry), most of his output that summer was small in scale – little ‘sunlight pochades’.*³² In what was surely a homage to Degas’ example he painted a small scene of the Dieppe Race Course.³³

Degas came to inspect Sickert’s paintings at the rue Sygogne, and was generous in his praise. He admired their finish. Passing the tips of his fingers over the smooth surface of the little panels he ‘commended the fact that they were “peint comme une porte” [painted like a door]’.³⁴ ‘La nature est lisse’ (Nature is smooth), he was fond of saying.³⁵ He did, however, raise a first doubt about the Whistlerian absence of detail and human interest in Sickert’s pictures. He urged Sickert to look at the works of Eugène Boudin, the painter of small-scale beach scenes who had inspired many of the Impressionists.³⁶ It was an important tip. As Sickert came to realize, where Whistler and some of the other Impressionists ‘tended to use their figures rather as spots to accentuate their landscapes’, Boudin proceeded ‘in reverse order, from the actors to the scenery’.³⁷ Degas also questioned another of Sickert’s Whistlerian traits: his fondness for low tones. Inspecting some of his darker pictures he remarked, ‘tout ça a un peu l’air de se passer la nuit’ (it all seems a bit like something taking place at night).³⁸

Buoyed up by these signs of Degas’ effectual interest, Sickert’s energy was irrepressible. George Moore, who was over on holiday, thought that no one had ever been ‘as young as Sickert was that summer at Dieppe’. He recalled him ‘coming in at the moment of sunset, his paint-box over his shoulders, his mouth full of words and laughter, his body at exquisite poise, and himself as unconscious of himself as a bird on a branch’.³⁹

Sickert’s mounting self-assurance did, however, lead to some moments of unexpected comedy. One chance encounter came to haunt him. Taken by a French acquaintance to see ‘a comrade of his, no longer a youth, who was thinking of throwing up a good berth in some administration in order to give himself up entirely to the practice of painting’, Sickert was introduced to a sturdy man with a black moustache and a bowler hat. ‘I am ashamed to say,’ Sickert recalled, ‘that the sketch I saw him doing left no very distinct impression on me, and that I expressed the opinion that the step he contemplated was rather imprudent than otherwise … his name was Gauguin.’⁴⁰

A happier meeting took place outside the Dieppe fishmarket when Sickert was able to introduce Degas to his father. Oswald Sickert was working on a pastel of the Quai Henri IV, which Degas generously and genuinely admired.* Walter was delighted to be able to bring together two of his artistic progenitors. He was becoming prodigal of artistic ‘parents’, though he strove to maintain a hierarchy amongst them. Despite all the excitement of Degas’ attention, he still thought of Whistler as his principal mentor. The ‘butterfly’ arrived in Dieppe at the end of September and promptly altered the flavour of the holiday with his nervous energy and restless spirit.⁴¹ Sickert fell into line behind his Master. Blanche was amused to see them head off together with their identical equipment and identical palettes, to set their little folding stools down in front of the same scenes.⁴²

This similarity of outward accoutrement, however, masked the subtle shifts in Sickert’s work that had occurred over the course of the summer. Degas’ influence and advice were already having an effect. Blanche considered that Sickert’s ‘petite planchettes’ – once so sombre – had transformed themselves ‘peu à peu sous l’influence de nos impressionistes’.⁴³ He also registered a change in Sickert’s increased interest in ‘figure drawing’ and in his new accentuation of ‘decorative and architectural pattern’.⁴⁴ But perhaps more significant for Sickert was seeing Whistler and Degas together. He noted the occasional tone of disparagement that Degas affected at Whistler’s grandstanding. Indeed when Sickert had first mentioned to Degas that he was ‘expecting Whistler on a visit’, the French artist had remarked, ‘Le rôle de papillon doit être bien fatigant, allez! J’aime mieux, moi, être le vieux boeuf, quoi?’† It was a first inkling for Sickert of the sometimes overstrained tension that Whistler set up between his public pose and his private practice as a painter.⁴⁵ And it was reinforced by other similarly caustic comments.* Sickert was amazed to notice that Whistler – the terror of the London drawing rooms – was somewhat in awe of Degas, and wary of his tongue. When Whistler gave an informal lecture one evening at the rue Sygogne on ‘The Secret of Art’ – a sort of scaled down version of the Ten o’Clock Lecture – Degas, though amused, was not unduly impressed.⁴⁶ Sickert’s own status, too, was changing. He was now a married man, with an independently wealthy wife, whilst Whistler was still a not very prosperous bachelor. During the course of the holiday Sickert lent his master £5.⁴⁷

The party broke up gradually towards the end of September. Degas returned to Paris ahead of the group, though he urged Sickert and Ellen to come and visit him there before they went back to London: ‘He said we must see a great deal of him in Paris at the beginning of next month,’ Ellen reported. ‘I do think he is perfectly delightful.’ And the sincerity of his invitation was reinforced by several kind messages.⁴⁸ It was too good an opportunity to miss.

In October, Walter and Ellen were in Paris. They called on Degas and were warmly received; his only sadness was that Jane Cobden could not be there as well. (As Ellen remarked teasingly to her sister, ‘You might do worse, Janie dear!’⁴⁹) He invited them to dine with him one evening, together with his ‘very best friends’, the artist Paul Bartholomé and his wife. There was also an opportunity to see his work.⁵⁰ He showed them some of his recent pastels – studies of unselfconscious women washing and drying themselves. Painters, he remarked, were too apt to make ‘formal portraits’ of women rather than allowing ‘their hundred and one gestures, their chatteries’ to inspire an infinite variety of design. ‘Je veux,’ he remarked, ‘regarder par le trou de la serrure [I wish to look through the keyhole].’⁵¹ The images possessed a startling directness and truth far beyond the coy eroticism or idealized fantasy of conventional late nineteenth-century nudes. Degas wondered how they would be received if he sent them to the Royal Academy. Sickert suggested they would not be received at all. ‘Je m’en doutais,’ Degas replied. ‘Ils n’admettant pas le cynisme dans l’art.’⁵²

The same sense of scrupulous detachment, if not cynicism, pervaded his pictures of popular performers: ballet dancers, circus acrobats, and café singers. He even described how he had employed the services of a professional draughtsman to help him with the perspective in his painting of the trapeze artist in La La at the Cirque Fernando.⁵³ The world of the popular stage was one that Degas loved, and he communicated his enthusiasm to Sickert, discoursing upon his favourite performers and singing snatches of music-hall ditties.⁵⁴ Treating Sickert as a fellow practitioner, he flattered him with a fusillade of technical tips: ‘On donne l’idée du vrai avec le faux’; ‘the art of painting [is] so to surround a patch of, say, Venetian red, that it appear[s] to be a patch of vermilion’.⁵⁵ They were, for the most part, ideas that Sickert could barely as yet comprehend, but he seized on them excitedly as coming from a true master – and a master who was interested in his education.

Degas was impressed and pleased by the ardour of his visitors. He gave them introductions not only to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, but also to several private collectors who held good examples of his work. Amongst the Sickerts’ artistic pilgrimages was one to the apartment off the Champs Élysées of Gustave Mulbacher – a successful coachbuilder who owned an impressive monochrome painting of a ballet rehearsal.⁵⁶ Ellen was captivated by the work; she thought Degas’ paintings ‘simply magnificent’, almost ‘the finest in the world’.⁵⁷

For Sickert they were a source of revelation and inspiration. Away from the holiday atmosphere of Dieppe, his friendship with Degas achieved a new intensity on the common ground of art. Degas’ studio became henceforth ‘the lighthouse’ of Sickert’s existence, and his friendship one of the great facts of his artistic life. From that time onwards, whenever he was in Paris Sickert had – as he put it with scant exaggeration – ‘the privilege of seeing constantly, on terms of affectionate intimacy, this truly great man’.⁵⁸

Walter and Ellen returned to London at the end of November lit up by the experience of being in Degas’ company and studying his work. Degas even followed up his many acts of kindness by sending Sickert ‘a beautiful letter’ that kept his presence alive in their minds.* As Ellen told Blanche, Degas’ pictures ‘haunt our imaginations’. She admitted that they would probably ‘end by giving up the dull necessities of life & buying one of his pictures’.⁵⁹ For the moment, however, the dull necessities took precedence. The Sickerts had no home. The house they intended to lease, in a new development at Broadhurst Gardens, near Swiss Cottage, was not yet ready for them. As a result, they were obliged to take lodgings in Albany Street, close to Regent’s Park.⁶⁰

* Annie Cobden’s husband, T. J. Sanderson, had amalgamated his name with that of his wife, to become T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. There seems to have been no suggestion that Sickert follow this course. Ellen, however, concerned to preserve the memory of her illustrious father, frequently – though not invariably – signed herself Mrs Cobden-Sickert.

* Sickert was beginning to appreciate the difficulties of working on a large scale directly from the motif. He had attempted to paint the Hôtel Royale on ‘a really large canvas’, setting up his easel on the hotel terrace. The size of the picture, however, had attracted the attention of all the passers-by, and he had soon drawn a considerable crowd. ‘And so,’ he concluded, ‘I burst into tears, and ran home.’ Violet Overton Fuller, ‘Letters to Florence Pash’, 36.

* The praise seems to have been well merited. Oswald Adalbert devoted that summer to working in pastel. Some of the pictures he produced – according to his daughter’s estimate – ‘showed a remarkable revival of interest in a man of fifty-seven’. Blanche, too, remembered them as ‘ravissant’ (HMS, 130; JEB, MS ‘Walter Sickert’).

† ‘The role of the butterfly must be pretty tiring. Me, I prefer to be the old ox.’

* ‘My dear Whistler, you behave like a man without talent,’ Degas declared of one of Whistler’s bouts of affectation. On the question of Whistler’s love of public controversy he remarked: ‘I find it quite possible to pass an arena’.

* The real affection between Degas and the Sickerts was confirmed early in the New Year when, to oblige Walter, Degas – who was attending to family business in Naples – called on the Richmond family at nearby Posilippo. Dorothy Richmond he had, of course, met at Dieppe in the summer, when the ‘jeune Australienne’, as he called her, had figured in some of the comic tableaux photographed by Walter Barnes.

CHAPTER THREE Impressions and Opinions

I THE BUTTERFLY PROPAGANDA

Always remember the golden rule – in art nothing matters

so long as you are bold.

(Whistler, quoted by Mortimer Menpes)

Sickert had hurried back to London in time for the opening of the Society of British Artists’ 1885 winter exhibition. Whistler’s increasing influence within the society, and the presence of the sympathetic young painter Jacomb Hood on the hanging committee, had secured a good showing for Sickert’s work and he had three small coastal scenes on display. Other members of the Whistlerian ‘school’ were also well represented.¹ Menpes, as a member, was of course able to show by right. He had been joined within the ranks of the club by William Stott though another Whistlerian nominee, Harper Pennington, was not successful.² Although the records of the SBA are not complete there is no evidence to suggest that Sickert was put forward for membership at this time – or later. Both he and Menpes appeared in the catalogue with the epithet ‘pupil of Whistler’ appended after their names.³ Such a designation was common currency in French exhibition catalogues, but the description, if not inappropriate, had the air of an attempt to a fix a position that was already shifting.

The Whistlerian group within the SBA may have been relatively small, but its impact was apparent. As Sickert wrote to Blanche (who also had a picture on view), ‘Suffolk Street has this advantage, that forward work may be seen there on an ample background of the most backward there is.’⁴ More, young ‘forward’-thinking artists began to be drawn to the club. Sickert met several new Whistlerian enthusiasts, amongst them Théodore Roussel, ‘a very pleasant fellow’ whom Whistler had recently taken up.⁵ A Frenchman by birth, Roussel had become a ‘cockney by adoption’, settling in London in the mid 1870s, when he was almost thirty. His twin passions were for Chelsea and Whistler. He took to depicting the former in the style of the latter – painting nocturnes of the Chelsea embankment and making etchings of the shopfronts in Church Street.⁶ He was, Sickert told Blanche, ‘the most thorough going & orthodox Whistlerite I have ever met’, and as such was a welcome addition to ‘the Butterfly propaganda’.⁷ Trailing doggedly in Roussel’s wake was his hunchbacked apprentice – and ‘mildly “damned soul” in low-toned riverside views’ – Paul Maitland.⁸

Less slavishly indebted to the Master, but none the less admiring, was Philip Wilson Steer. An almost exact contemporary of Sickert’s, Steer had only quite recently returned from two years’ study in Paris at the thoroughly traditional École des Beaux-Arts. Although he had seen some Impressionist work during his French sojourn, it was Whistler who most impressed him. When he returned to London at the end of 1884, he took a studio in Chelsea and began experimenting in a Whistlerian vein.⁹ He also tried out several other artistic styles. The painting he sent to the SBA exhibition that winter – a small Arcadian panel of a female goatherd – owed rather more to Bastien-Lepage than to anyone else. It certainly had a French title – Le Soir – which may have almost been enough on its own to persuade Sickert to seek out its author.¹⁰

Sickert discovered an ally, a friend, and a foil. Even at twenty-five, Steer’s handsome, slightly bovine features proclaimed a staid and comfort-loving temperament. Forward looking and Francophile in his painting, in almost all other matters he was innately conservative and English. He disliked change almost as much as he disliked draughts. His pleasures were many if simple: tea, toast, cats, Chelsea Pottery figurines (‘the best bad taste’), and mild flirtations with young models. And he had enough private income to be able to indulge them. Placid, self-effacing, and instinctive, he was in many respects an opposite to the energetic, communicative, and intellectualizing Sickert. But opposites attract, and they formed an instant bond. It helped, too, that they made each other laugh.

Sickert’s excitement at these new contacts and opportunities was abruptly curtailed at the beginning of December when his father fell ill – after taking a chill while out sketching – and then ‘rather suddenly’ died.¹¹ It was a ‘great grief’, and an unexpected one.¹² Oswald Adalbert Sickert was only fifty-seven. Although by all the conventional standards he had failed to establish himself as an artist, Walter admired him greatly, both for his work and his judgement. ‘I have never’, he later claimed, ‘forgotten anything he said to me.’¹³ The great sadness was that he had not said more. Walter came to regret all the subjects – especially those relating to painting – they had never had a chance to discuss.¹⁴ Sickert already had a sense that he stood in the third generation of a line of painters. His father’s death sharpened that perception, and placed a new onus of responsibility upon him. He preserved amongst his most treasured possessions examples of his father’s – and his grandfather’s – work, and drew strength from their suggestions of a shared and continuous artistic tradition.¹⁵

Sickert’s immediate duty was to his mother, who was all but inconsolable and little able to attend to the demands of the moment. He moved back to Pembroke Gardens with Ellen in order to help with the funeral and other arrangements.*¹⁶ Ellen got on well with her mother-in-law, but even she struggled to draw Mrs Sickert from the depths of her grief. That feat was eventually accomplished by the unlikely figure of Oscar Wilde. He insisted upon seeing Mrs Sickert and gently coaxed her into talking of her husband and her loss. As Helena recalled, ‘He stayed a long while, and before he went I heard my mother laughing.’¹⁷ After she had rallied, Mrs Sickert began to settle into the role of matriarch. Controlling the family finances, she kept her children close about her. Robert and Bernhard, though in their early twenties and struggling away at uncongenial clerical jobs, both continued to live at home. Helena, who had been up at Girton College, Cambridge, studying Moral Sciences (the fees being paid by her godmother), ‘found it impossible’ to leave her grieving mother. Oswald Valentine and Leonard were still at school.¹⁸

Walter, for all his real filial affection, was careful to preserve a measure of independence and distance. As the eldest male – and the most powerful personality – he assumed a position of some command. One of his first acts was to persuade his mother that the feckless Bernhard was ‘a painter and nothing but a painter’ and should be spared the trials of conventional employment.¹⁹ He had had a picture accepted that winter at the SBA, and Sickert had drawn him into the circle of Whistlerites. He remained, however, very much a younger brother: it was understood that he should sign his works in full, while Walter could use their surname unadorned, on the grounds – as Walter explained to him – that ‘if we had been girls, I should have been Miss Sickert [as the eldest], but you would have been Miss Bernhard Sickert’.²⁰

Walter and Ellen finally moved into their new home at 54 Broad-hurst Gardens just before Christmas 1885; their first batch of headed writing paper had black mourning-borders. The house – part of a development of small-scale, four-storey, semi-detached dwellings – was in the fashionable aesthetic style, its red-brick façade broken by white-framed windows, its silhouette dominated by a steeply pointed gable end into which a balustraded picture window had been set. The developer had clearly been seeking to attract an artistic clientele for there was a ‘good studio’ at the top of the house, connected to the ground floor by a ‘speaking tube’.²¹ Sickert soon made himself at home in this ‘large, airy upper chamber’.²² He installed an etching bench and a small press, and gathered about him the paraphernalia of painting, as well as various studio ‘comforts’ given to him by his family: a rug, a footstool, a slop-pail, and a can. There was also ‘a comfortable settee’ upon which he could retire to think or read.²³

The one misfortune of the move was that the new plasterwork had reacted strangely with the sky-blue distemper they had chosen for the walls of the three principal rooms – turning the colour to a ‘cold mauve’. The effect, Ellen noted, was ‘painful as the painted woodwork is the right blue-green’, and nothing could be done to correct it until the spring.²⁴ Such was the horror of the colour combination that, even before they were properly settled, they were thinking of moving. There was talk of building a smaller house ‘quite to our satisfaction’ close by.²⁵

Married life inevitably drew Sickert away from Whistler’s immediate ambit. Swiss Cottage was not close to Chelsea, and the business of furnishing a house was a time-consuming one.²⁶ There were new interests, new connections, and new commitments to accommodate. Ellen had a wide circle of friends, and her sisters came to live close by.²⁷ The whole world of the Cobdenites – old allies of Ellen’s father – was ready to welcome the happy couple and include Walter in the circle. He now found himself dining at political tables.²⁸ He was a regular guest of Tom Potter, the fat and good-natured MP for Rochdale, whom Gladstone described as the ‘depository of Cobden’s traditions’,²⁹ and he saw something of the ever more politically inclined William Morris at Kelmscott House. Having formed no particular political views of his own, Sickert was happy to adopt Ellen’s hereditary loyalties. He got on well with her father’s old cronies, though he enjoyed vexing William Morris’s handcraft sensibilities by wearing a ready-made tie in the worst possible taste whenever he and Ellen visited Hammersmith.³⁰

Sickert seems to have been able to flourish in almost any company. Marriage to Ellen opened up new social opportunities for him; but he had already learnt society’s ways, and though he was attracted by its rewards he never succumbed to its ethos. He enjoyed flouting its conventions even as he embraced them.* His detachment remained secure. He learnt to play the man of the world, adding to the remarkable social confidence and charm he possessed, even as a boy, an almost princely courtesy. But, as one observer noted, in all his dealings with society there lurked beneath the surface an ‘undefinable and evasive mockery’.³¹ It was the mockery of the ‘artist’, but also the mockery of a second-generation bastard with a foreign name.

Despite all distractions, Whistler remained the central focus of Sickert’s life, and Ellen adopted it too. Indeed 54 Broadhurst Gardens, in its decor and style, was conceived as something of an hommage to the Master. Ellen even referred to it jokingly as ‘our Whistler House’.³² They owned Whistler’s picture A White Note; the green-and-white wardrobe painted by Whistler was installed; and almost the Sickerts’ first act after their marriage was to commission portraits of themselves from Whistler at 100 guineas apiece.† Sickert insisted on regarding this as a very favourable rate – ‘practically a fantastic present’.³³ Ellen worked hard to win Whistler’s trust. She gained it – along with his gratitude – when she deployed her influence to prevent Harry Quilter – the hostile art critic of The Times and new owner of the White House – from receiving a testimonial from her friend John Morley.³⁴ Whistler responded readily to such overtures.

It was certainly Whistler’s influence that secured Sickert a small one-man show at Dowdeswell’s Gallery during the dead season of January – a gathering of about twenty ‘little panels’, mostly of Dieppe.³⁵ In the catalogue, Sickert was again captioned as the ‘pupil of Whistler’; the critics thought he still had lessons to absorb. ‘In what our [French] neighbours call facture,’ wrote the Illustrated London News’ reviewer,

Mr Sickert has certainly caught something of his master’s trick; but in the inner perception of the ‘things unseen’, which Mr Whistler led us often to feel were lurking behind his misty foregrounds, the pupil has still much to learn. If his aim has been to catch fleeting impressions and to transfer them at once to his canvases for subsequent use and study, there is no reason to find fault with the delicacy of his perception; but it is rather a misnomer to call such works pictures, or to attempt to pass them as the result of serious application. For the most part, the colouring is flat and opaque, and in nearly every case far too imitative of his master’s ‘symphonies’ and ‘arrangements’.*³⁶

The confusion between the sketch and the painting was one of the standard criticisms of Impressionist art. Sickert would have expected it. But he does seem to have resolved – in the wake of the Dowdeswell show – to work on a slightly larger scale. For the future, he decided not to send ‘such small things’ to the Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy.³⁷

A hint of promise was noted by the reviewer in the single-figure picture Olive; it was praised as showing ‘that Mr. Sickert, when left to think for himself, can produce satisfactory work, and contains the germ of better things’.³⁸ But even in his figure pictures, though the critic may not have recognized it, Sickert’s approach seems to have been directed closely by Whistler’s example. Menpes recalled receiving a telegraphed summons to Broadhurst Gardens portending an important discovery. He and Sickert had noted Whistler’s recently adopted ‘system’ of painting with ready-mixed and ready-diluted colours such as ‘floor tone’, ‘flesh tone’, and ‘blue sky tone’, which he kept always on hand. Sickert had at once seized upon the idea – and carried it further. Menpes, as he made his way up to the attic studio, could hear an ominous ‘dripping sound’. He found Sickert working from a model, surrounded by ‘about fifty milk cans’, each filled with a different tone: ‘lip tone, eye tone etc.’. The paint was so liquid that, as he tried to get it from the pot on to the canvas, it dripped all over the floor. And the operation had to be undertaken at such speed that it could hardly be accurate: most of the eye tone ‘went on to the background’. ‘I felt that the eye should be in the face,’ Menpes remembered, ‘but still it was an eye, and it was art, and in art – according to the Whistlerites’ dictum – nothing mattered as long as you were reckless and had your tones.’³⁹

It was at about this time that the small but growing inner circle of Whistler ‘followers’ formalized themselves into a club. They decided to hire a room where they might meet of an evening ‘for the discussion of art’. Gathered at Menpes’ house in Fulham one evening, the seven members consulted a map of London, marking their homes on it with red dots, and then estimating the most convenient central location for their meeting place. Baker Street was fixed upon and a little room was taken there for six shillings a week. Beyond Menpes and Sickert the exact membership of the group is unknown, but the original line-up almost certainly included Sidney Starr, Harper Pennington, and Alberto Ludovici Jr. Théodore Roussel was an early addition.⁴⁰ Other possible members were Bernhard Sickert, William Stott, Jacomb Hood, and Philip Wilson Steer. The claims of such female followers as Maud Franklin and Elizabeth Armstrong seem to have been ignored.* Adopting what they considered to be a Whistlerian maxim – ‘Nature never makes a mistake in matching her tones’ – the group decorated their room as a ‘harmony’ of sea and sky with sky-blue distemper walls and a sea-green distemper ceiling, whilst the woodwork was painted ‘the tone of the Dover cliffs’. Although the scheme was, from a naturalistic point of view, upside down, it was, of course, another Whistlerian axiom that nature was just as beautiful either way up. Headed notepaper was ordered, stamped with a symbolic motif – ‘a steam engine advancing, with a red-light displayed, – a warning signal to the Philistines that the reformers were on their track’.⁴¹

In their earnest discussions around the inadequate paraffin stove, in their quest for that ‘great discovery in the matter of method, or of pigment, or of manipulation’ that would ‘revolutionise all the old canons of art’, Whistler remained their guiding light. Théodore Roussel brought a touch of scientific rigour to their deliberations. Of a technical bent, he had designed what he called (in his heavily accented English) a ‘tone detector-r-r’ – an optical device for matching the tones of nature. He also worked out a scheme for mixing perfectly pure pigments from ground-up crystals.⁴² But, for all the reverence accorded to Whistler, the parallel attractions of Degas were not to be ignored. Sickert, on his return from Paris, enthused his confrères with descriptions of the work he had seen there. As he told Blanche, he only wished he could ‘bring the whole school over to Paris to make the Mulbacher and other pilgrimages’ – that they might examine Degas’ pictures at first hand.⁴³ Although the followers did not advertise to Whistler this new interest in Degas – or ‘Digars’, as Menpes referred to him – they considered the two artists as twin spirits, Impressionists both.* They tried to combine the method of one with the subject matter of the other, producing not entirely satisfactory pictures of ‘low toned’ ballet girls.⁴⁴

Another alternative voice was provided by Charles Keene. Sickert had come to know him well. He visited him at his studio in the King’s Road, and invited him to Broadhurst Gardens.⁴⁵ They dined together at the Arts Club in Dover Street (it was Keene who put Sickert up for membership there in 1888),⁴⁶ and they talked of art. Keene impressed Sickert on many levels: in his practical attitude to his craft; in his patient humility (‘Think of that great man drawing all those bricks,’ Sickert remarked of Keene’s depiction of a garden wall); in his artistic engagement with the world around him.⁴⁷ There were useful tips to be gleaned. Sickert observed how Keene worked always on a relatively small scale.⁴⁸ He relished his diatribe against the use of nude models in art schools on the ground that ‘the world being filled with clothed persons, modern painters will have more need to learn how to paint them than to paint nudes’.⁴⁹ He noted, too, how Keene used himself as his own clothed model, keeping a variety of costumes hanging on pegs in his studio for the purpose.⁵⁰

In most things Keene offered a rather different perspective to Whistler. There was no pretension about him or his art: he had achieved his greatness ‘doing drawings for a threepenny comic paper to make his living’ – and that was what he went on doing.⁵¹ His view of Whistler, though generally admiring, was not overburdened with reverence. He surprised Sickert, and set him thinking, by a preference for Whistler’s paintings over his etchings.⁵² After revealing an heretical admiration for the work of the Berlin realist Adolph Menzel, he confided ‘with one of his monumental and comprehensive winks, “Ye know, I like bad pictures. But don’t tell Jimmy.”’⁵³

Though Keene, like Degas, might offer the first hint of an alternative vision, for the time being it remained only a hint. Sickert had little difficulty in reconciling all attractive ideas with those of Whistler. The essential commitment to Whistler’s cause and Whistler’s interests remained constant. He did a drawing of a Whistler painting for reproduction in the Pall Mall Budget, and fired off a letter to the Daily News after it had had the temerity to suggest that England lacked a painter who could depict English snow.⁵⁴ He even undertook to sort out a dispute that had arisen between Whistler and the Fine Art Society over a missing pair of Venice etchings.⁵⁵ His attendance at Whistler’s studio may have slackened, but it did not cease. Beatrice Godwin, who had recently separated from her husband, was sitting to Whistler (who greatly admired her), and Sickert made an etching of her in the same pose.⁵⁶ He also sat for his own portrait.⁵⁷

Whistler’s power base within the Society of British Artists continued to expand. He was active in putting forward his supporters for membership – Starr was elected in the spring of 1886 – but Sickert, as a non-member, remained vulnerable to the vagaries of the picture selection process. The conservative element within the SBA was still formidable and, as Sickert explained to Blanche, while the Whistlerites had been lucky to have Jacomb Hood on the hanging committee, ‘next time it may be three idiots’.⁵⁸ And perhaps that was how it turned out. Sickert was not represented in the society’s April exhibition. The rebuff would have been felt the more keenly because Starr’s painting – of Paddington station – was the hit of the show.⁵⁹ Some hope for the future was, however, given when Whistler was elected President of the SBA at the beginning of June, provoking what Mrs Sickert described as ‘much glory among the faithful pupils & adherents’.⁶⁰

Sickert did not stay to revel in the glory for long. He went to Paris for a few days: the Salon had recently opened and so, more importantly, had the eighth – and final – Impressionist Exhibition, which included several new works by Degas.⁶¹ His and Ellen’s resolve to buy a Degas picture had strengthened, and it was probably on this trip that Sickert arranged the purchase of the pastel La Danseuse Verte. It came from the private collection of Charles Ephrussi, though the sale was handled by a dealer. Sickert paid a little over 2000 francs (about £80) for the picture.⁶² He also noted a second work, a pastel lithograph, at the dealer Closet’s: ‘A singer with two white gloves & many globes of light & a green wooden thing behind & fireworks in the sky & two women’s heads in the audience.’⁶³ Back in London, he and Ellen decided that they should buy this picture as well. The price was only £16. Ellen agreed to sell some stocks to pay for it, but the sum was required quickly and Sickert wrote to Whistler pleading for the return of some of the money they had paid him on account for their portraits. Tactfully, he suggested it was needed for living expenses.⁶⁴ Blanche was then commissioned to buy the picture – if possible at a discount.⁶⁵ Displaying his characteristic helpfulness and efficiency, Blanche delivered the picture in person when he came to London at the end of the month (Sickert repaid the kindness by presenting his friend with a small painting of his own).⁶⁶ Blanche was charmed by the Sickerts’ new home: a ‘maison délicieuse … pleine de jolies choses’ (the cold mauve walls had been repainted)⁶⁷ and was amazed to discover the Danseuse Verte, which he had known well chez Ephrussi, now on their wall. He assumed that Sickert must have ‘pas mal d’argent’ to be making such acquisitions.⁶⁸

The assumption, as Blanche soon came to realize, was quite false. Sickert had no money. If he had possessed any he would certainly have been extravagant with it. In its absence he was extravagant with his wife’s. Throughout the first flush of home-making Ellen seems to have encouraged such expenditure. The house in Broadhurst Gardens was by no means cheap: at just under £80 a year, the rent and rates were not inconsiderable – quite apart from the cost of decking the walls with works by Degas and Whistler.⁶⁹ It was only with time that Ellen came to recognize her husband’s complete – almost wilful – recklessness in money matters. ‘Giving money to Walter’, she once remarked, ‘is like giving it to a child to light a fire with.’⁷⁰ With no income of his own, and no sales from his pictures, he was almost entirely dependent upon her. She gave him an allowance, but sought to control his excesses by keeping it small.⁷¹ To evade such restrictions he ran up debts and borrowed occasional small sums from Whistler, his mother, and his brothers.⁷² Sickert disbursed what he had with a programmatic recklessness. ‘I am so convinced’, he told one friend, ‘that the way to have, is to spend, and that lavish generosity pays, as well as being delightful. The thing is to give, give, give. You always get back more than you give.’⁷³

The summer of 1886 was hot. By mid July Ellen had begun to wilt, and Walter’s studio under the roof at Broadhurst Gardens had become ‘like an oven’. For relief, they fled to the glaciers of Switzerland, stopping to admire some ‘wonderful’ Holbeins at Basle. Ellen loved Alpine air and Alpine scenery; Walter was less convinced. ‘I suppose it is very healthy,’ he told Blanche, ‘but I prefer Marylebone for a holiday.’ He fell ill after taking a dip in the Rhine, and altogether could not wait to be back in London ‘with the green danseuse who is better than all the scenery of Switzerland’. He filled the long hours at Pontresina, the little resort town where they were staying, by making a closely worked etching of a young girl standing in the gloom of a dark kitchen – one of several ‘Rembrandt interiors’ he had noted.⁷⁴ They returned to England at the end of September via Munich and Dresden, where – to judge from the series of etchings that Walter produced – they had a rather jollier and more active time in crowded cafés and at the Oktoberfest.⁷⁵

Back in London, Sickert threw himself into the exhibition season with new vigour. Although Whistler’s presidency prompted a radical overhaul of the SBA’s exhibiting policy (the Suffolk Street galleries were refurbished to Whistler’s designs, and the number of works on show was drastically reduced), total control was impossible. The society, in Sickert’s words, remained ‘half-savage’. There could be no guarantee that work by Whistler’s followers would be accepted. But for the efforts of Menpes and Stott, who were acting as ‘supervisors’, Sickert’s picture would have been rejected by a ‘stodgy’ hanging committee.⁷⁶

The painting, Rehearsal: The End of the Act, marked Sickert’s promised break from small-scale Whistlerian sketches. It was almost two foot square and depicted a woman slumped on a padded sofa. The well-informed would, nevertheless, perhaps still have recognized a Whistlerian debt. The model was Helen Lenoir of the D’Oyly Carte Company. Her exhausted pose might be read as the result of her labours in producing the Ten o’Clock Lecture. To reinforce the connection, Sickert’s earlier print of Miss Lenoir – The Acting Manager – was also on view, with several other works, at the Society of Painter-Etchers. Looking beyond the established outlets, Sickert also sent a figure study titled Ethel to the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, a staid old society that numbered several of his father’s friends amongst its members.⁷⁷

His busy round of active self-advertisement was unexpectedly rewarded when he received an invitation to exhibit in the New Year with Les XX, a recently formed avant-garde Belgian art association that had instituted an annual salon in Brussels. At first Sickert suspected Blanche’s beneficent influence was behind this coup, being unable to imagine that his own ‘unassisted fame could have led any Society, however perspicacious, to single out the genius that [was] modestly hidden in the suburb of Hampstead’.⁷⁸ But that, it seems, is almost what had happened. Blanche was not involved. The Belgian painter Willy Finch had noticed Sickert’s work on a visit to England, and noticed too, no doubt, its debt to Whistler, of whom he was a great admirer. Acting as a talent scout, Finch had written enthusiastically to Octave Maus, the secretary of Les XX, praising the pictures as ‘très raffinées comme art’;⁷⁹ and Maus had duly sent an invitation. Sickert swelled with pride at this ‘marque de la plus haute distinction’, as he termed it in his fulsome letter of acceptance. He at once began work on a very large canvas some six foot square.⁸⁰

Sickert’s determined application was impressive, and his development, though perhaps less accelerated than Menpes’ or Starr’s, was certainly discernible to close observers. Whistler, who was not given to praising, noted it. That summer, while going round the Royal Academy show, he had impressed the critic Malcolm Salaman with a stray remark in front of a canvas by the young James Lavery. ‘Yes – very nice, don’t you know?’ he had said in his curiously effective manner. ‘But well, you know of all the young men, I should say, the one who will go furthest is Walter Sickert.’⁸¹ George Moore recounted a similar exchange.* And if Moore knew a thing he never wasted any time in passing it on. Sickert would have been aware both of his progress and of how much was expected of him.

Whistler’s admiration was, however, tempered by a keen sense of insecurity. Sickert’s extended holiday abroad, his decision to send to the Institute, the other demands upon his life, all vexed the ever touchy Master. Whistler wrote a peevish note to his pupil, complaining that he and his affairs were being neglected. Sickert sprang forward with assurances of continued loyalty and affection. ‘My dear Jimmy, You have written to me in a fit of the blues. Indifference you know perfectly well I have never shown towards anything that concerned you, dating back to years before I even knew you, and independence is a quality the merit of which I have never heard you throw a doubt upon – except indeed in the case of Switzerland and there I went for health & not for scenery.’ As to the ‘matter of the Institute’, Sickert explained that it had its ‘pleasant side’ for Whistler, showing that ‘now you have taught me to walk I am not crying to be carried’. Besides, it was a necessity for Sickert to ‘peddle’ his work where and how he could: ‘Painting must be for me a profession & not a pastime, or else I must give it up & take to something practical.’⁸² Ellen added her voice to these protestations. She promised to come and pose again for her portrait, and to bring Walter with her – so that he could ‘during the sittings attend to any affairs on which he can be useful to you’.⁸³

Sickert’s reference to painting as his ‘profession’ was an optimistic statement of intent, rather than of fact. As yet his ‘profession’ had yielded few tangible rewards. His pictures did not sell. If he was gaining a reputation it was only amongst the tiny coterie of Whistler’s followers. He made presents of his paintings to most of the members of the school – to Menpes, Starr, Roussel, and Elizabeth Armstrong – and borrowed back several of these small panels to send in to Les XX. But his new large painting was not finished in time. He sent instead the picture of Miss Lenoir on her sofa, which had just been returned from the SBA show.⁸⁴

The exhibition began in February 1887. Sickert could not travel to Brussels for the opening, but the press reports made clear the challenging nature of the event. Amongst the vague Symbolist imaginings and Impressionist morsels on view, the painting that attracted the greatest attention was Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The picture confirmed a development hinted at in the last Impressionist exhibition. Its novel approach to colour – dividing its constituent hues into tiny dots – had been dubbed ‘Neo-Impressionism’ by the young French critic Félix Fénéon, and already other artists were taking it up. Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac were both represented in the show with ‘Neo-Impressionist’ works, while the Belgian artists Willie Finch and Théo van Rysselberghe were also beginning to experiment with the technique. Against such scintillating novelty Sickert’s contributions appeared both literally and figuratively insubstantial. The reviewer for L’Indépendence Belge remarked that although one of his paintings was called Trois Nuages, the title would have been apt for almost any of them: ‘tant ils sont tous nuageux’.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, to be in the exhibition at all was an achievement and a thrill.⁸⁶

If Menpes is to be believed, the innovative work on view in Brussels provoked Sickert and the other members of the Baker Street band to emulation. They became, for a while, ‘prismatic’ and began to experiment with painting ‘in spots and dots’.⁸⁷ For Sickert, however, the main effect of his exposure to the swift current of the Continental avant-garde was upon his subject matter.

* Oswald Adalbert Sickert was buried at Brompton Cemetry. His personal estate, which he left entirely to his wife, was valued at just £295. 10s. 11d.

* His family used to despair at some his ‘outrageous’ ploys, ‘such as turning up at society functions in all kinds of odd clothes’: one his favourite outfits was a ‘country squire’ (reminiscences of a servant of the Sickert family during the 1880s, quoted in LB, II, 14).

† Sickert never hung the walls of his homes with his own work. To have done so would have seemed to him ‘a form of incest’ (RE, 287).

* Sickert’s command of the superficial aspects of Whistler’s style could, it seems, deceive some people. In later years, Sickert liked to tell an anecdote of how he had been entrusted to deliver a small Whistler panel to a customer in Dieppe. Crossing over to France on the ferry, the picture had been torn from his grasp by a gust of wind and blown overboard. Undeterred, on arrival at Dieppe, he had assembled some materials and painted his own version of the scene, which he then delivered to the unsuspecting – and completely satisfied – customer. Sickert told this rather fanciful story to Donald Ball in the late 1930s, when Ball was a student at the Thanet School of Art.

* A study of the artists’ addresses in 1885/6 provides some clues, with Menpes, Roussel, and Steer living in Chelsea, Bernhard Sickert in Kensington, Walter Sickert in Swiss Cottage, Starr in Fitzroy Street, and Ludovici in Camden Town. The date of the foundation of the club is conjectural; but, given its Baker Street location, it is difficult to suppose that it occurred before the Sickerts’ move to Broadhurst Gardens.

* The correct pronunciation of Degas’ name became one of Sickert’s great – and abiding – causes. ‘Day-gas, day-gas, why’, he lamented, ‘do the English always say Day-gas.’ He never tired of pointing out that Gas was a town in France from which Degas’ ancestors had come, and that the name had originally been spelled De Gas, making this – and the pronunciation – clear (WS, ‘John Everett Millais’, Fortnightly Review, June 1929).

* ‘One day walking with [Whistler] I heard the Master mutter – at first it was but a mutter, but gradually the mutter grew more distinct, and I heard him say, “Well, you know, talking of Walter … I don’t mean that Walter will ever do as much as Manet, but if we are to consider the relations of Art and Nature, and of English painting to those red things which –” The rest of the sentence I never heard, it was lost in guffaws. By red things the Master meant portraits of officers in uniform, but this by the way. What immediately concerns us is that the Master looked upon Walter Sickert as a great painter.’ Saturday Review (23 June 1906), 784.

II A NEW ENGLISH ARTIST

‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’

(Music-hall song)

Sickert was in search of a new and personal motif. His little seascapes and townscapes proclaimed a too obvious Whistlerian debt. The ballet, the racecourse, and the bathroom belonged to Degas. And although France offered other possibilities, Degas was insistent that English artists should search for English sources of inspiration.¹ Sickert seems to have considered some conventional options. One friend who met him at this time recalled that he was working away at a series of cathedrals.² But the attractions of ecclesiastical architecture did not long engage him. He turned instead to the more daring possibilities of the modern music hall. This was in effect a transposition to a London setting of one of Degas’ chosen subjects – the café chantant (as depicted in the Sickerts’ Mlle Bécat aux Ambassadeurs). Although the Victorian music hall might now seem the essence of quaintness, in the 1880s it was something quite different: modern, metropolitan, vulgar, artificial, and daring. It was also distinctly British. Since his first meeting with Degas, Sickert had been toying with theatrical subjects. Besides the ‘low toned ballet girls’ of the previous year, he had made etchings of the circus, of Punch and Judy shows, and even of the occasional music-hall audience. But it was only now that he began to investigate the subject with real concentration, considering it as a motif for painting.³

It was fertile ground. The music halls were a phenomenon of the age. Scores of them were dotted across London and its suburbs. They had – in their short life – evolved from glorified pub theatres to become institutions in their own right. But they were still dominated by alcohol. The bar was always open and a ticket usually included the price of at least one drink. Shows lasted all evening, from eight till midnight, and the audience – gathered at tables close to the stage, settled in red-plush chairs, or crammed onto benches in the gallery – were part of the show. Spectators heckled the acts, abused each other, and joined in with the choruses, while a chairman kept order and announced the succession of ‘turns’. Although some of the smart new halls offered ‘ballet’ and ingenious novelty acts, on the popular fringe song and dance still held sway, offering a diet of mawkish sentiment, broad humour, rampant jingoism, and sexual allusion. They were themes, and treatments, that appealed to the vast mass of London’s working class; and increasingly they appealed to others too. Although the guardians of public morality regarded the halls with horror, as sinks of debauchery and arenas of vice, a few bohemian spirits relished their heady atmosphere. Sickert was a pioneer in the field, but he was not alone. George Moore also had an enthusiasm for the halls, as did Steer and Ludovici. ‘What delightful unanimity of soul,’ Moore wrote, ‘what community of wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other’s presence; in a word there was life.’⁴ Sickert found a rich pictorial drama in the low tones of the auditorium, the garish light of the stage, and in the fleeting arrangements of the performers. But it appealed too because it was both daring and previously untapped. Whistler had never attempted to paint it, and nor had anyone else. It was a chance to stake a claim on something new – and something that was likely to shock.

Once Sickert began work on this new theme, he quickly came to realize that the methods and techniques he had learnt from Whistler provided almost no clue of how to proceed. A pochade box was useless: sitting in the semi-darkness of a music hall unable to see his colours or move his elbows, he could not paint from life. Painting the whole scene from memory – as Whistler did with his nocturnes – was likewise impossible. He could study and observe – but only so much. Compared to a Thames-side warehouse, the auditorium of a London music hall was both too complex and too fugitive to be learnt in full. So he turned instead to the example of Degas. He started to work from snatches of repeatedly ‘observed and remembered’ movement, from drawings, and from notes.⁵ He returned night after night to the same seat in the same music hall to study his scene: to memorize and set down a single significant move or gesture, to note the divisions of light and shade, the subtle grades of tone, and the rich vestiges of colour. It was as a detached, unobserved member of an excited audience that Sickert evolved his rare power of objective vision – ‘the one thing’, as he later described it, ‘in all my experience that I cling to … my coolness and leisurely exhilarated contemplation’.⁶ He proliferated tiny drawings, some done in little, lined, laundry books, others on postcards.⁷ He captioned them with colour notes, or – more often – with the words of a song or a snatch of dialogue: an aural aidemémoire. The composition of the pictures was mapped out, the elements marshalled, and the paint applied, not on site but back in the studio. In most of his early experiments he borrowed from Degas the conventions of Mlle Bécat aux Ambassadeurs – viewing a single footlit artiste over a ragged silhouette of foreground figures.

At the 1887 spring exhibition of the SBA, Sickert unveiled his first music-hall painting – Le Mammoth Comique. The picture – a small canvas of an open-mouthed, evening-suited singer standing against a stage backdrop with the orchestra pit in the foreground – provoked surprisingly little comment. It was admired as being ‘clever’ by both the critic from the Daily Telegraph and by Mrs Sickert;⁸ but the debt to Degas was not remarked. Whistler’s views on the work are unknown.⁹ The President had other things to engage his attention that season. The Prince and Princess of Wales visited the exhibition.* There were hopes that the society would be given a Royal Charter and even that the President might receive a knighthood. (The former came to pass, the latter did not.) Another visitor was Claude Monet, who had come over to stay with Whistler and promised to send work to the next exhibition. Amongst these excitements, Sickert’s little music-hall scene was a minor distraction.

At the beginning of June, Sickert – together with Ellen – crossed to the Netherlands to stay at the seaside resort of Scheveningen.¹⁰ The excursion may have been, in part, an act of piety, for Whistler had painted and etched there often. Sickert, too, made numerous small etchings of the beach and its distinctive hooded wicker chairs – or windstolen – as well as some rather brighter and less obviously Whistlerian paintings. Yet even when working in his master’s idiom, Sickert’s own voice was becoming gradually more apparent. The etchings that he showed that November at the Society of Painter-Etchers – where, greatly to Ellen’s delight, he had been elected a fellow – were praised for their ‘individuality’ and accomplishment.¹¹

‘Individuality’ was not something that Whistler particularly encouraged amongst his pupils. He seems to have ignored Sickert’s achievements, and engaged him instead in his own printmaking activities. Under the guidance of his printer friend Thomas Way, Whistler was experimenting with lithography after a break of several years,¹² and Sickert was invited to try his hand at the medium.¹³ Rather less flatteringly, he was also charged with carrying the Master’s weighty lithographic stone when they set out together of an evening, ‘in case inspiration should come during or after dinner’. As a friend recorded, ‘at the Café Royal or elsewhere the waiter was enjoined to place an extra table for the stone’, but more often than not it was still untouched when Sickert would have to carry it away at the end of the night’s entertainment.¹⁴

Sickert did not seek to build on the achievement of Le Mammoth Comique at the winter exhibition of the now ‘Royal’ Society of British Artists.¹⁵ He was keeping his powder dry, for all was not well at Suffolk Street. Although Whistler’s achievement of royal patronage had won the universal approbation of the SBA membership, on most other fronts he was assailed by complaints. Seeking to bring matters to a head, he put forward a motion calling for members to resign their attachments to all other societies, including even the Royal Academy. This was not a popular move. Many members exhibited and sold pictures with other variously distinguished national and local societies. They saw nothing to gain from complete exclusivity and much to lose. Rather than provoking the conservative element to leave the club, as he had hoped, Whistler provoked them into rebellion. His motion was defeated, and a battle line was drawn. A group of members began to campaign for the President’s removal; and although Whistler sought to bolster his position by drafting more supporters into the ranks of the society (Théodore Roussel and Waldo Story both became members in 1887), the vulnerability of his position became increasingly apparent.

It was against this gathering crisis that Sickert began to look beyond the confines of Suffolk Street. The RSBA was, he realized, ‘a house divided against itself’ and ‘the split’ would come ‘sooner or later’.¹⁶ It was as well to be prepared. As a non-member he relied on the Whistlerian control of the selection process to secure a showing for his pictures. If Whistler were ousted there could be no guarantee that his work would continue to be accepted, and every possibility that it would not.

Sickert needed to find a new forum for his work. Steer and several other of Sickert’s Baker Street confrères had recently exhibited with a society called the New English Art Club, and their example encouraged him to look in this direction.¹⁷ The club had been established only the previous year, in 1886, by a group of artists, the majority of whom had received some training in the Paris studios (indeed one suggested name for the club had been ‘The Society of Anglo-French Painters’).¹⁸ The original members were ‘a mixed crew’ and the influence that France exerted over the work took various forms – and existed at various strengths.¹⁹ John Singer Sargent was a founder member, but perhaps the dominant artistic strain was the large-scale plein-airism derived from Bastien-Lepage: scenes of a slightly sentimentalized English rural realism done in ‘what [was] known as French technique’.²⁰ This school was represented by George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes, Henry la Thangue, Henry Scott Tuke, and numerous lesser lights.

Besides the Baker Street group, there were a few other members of the new body who professed an interest in the work of the French Impressionists, even if their own pictures tended to show only the faintest traces of actual influence. It was one of these, Fred Brown, who had invited Steer to exhibit with the club, having been impressed by the quasi-idyllic painting of a goat girl exhibited at the SBA in 1885.²¹ Brown, then in his mid thirties, had been teaching at the Westminster School of Art since 1877, offering night classes in drawing and painting to working men and part-time students. He was an inspired and inspiring teacher, and had established a reputation for the clarity of his approach. It was work that kept him in touch with the rising generation of artists – as well as giving him a taste for administrative organization. He emerged as one of the guiding spirits of the new club and drew up its novel, and thoroughly democratic, constitution: there was no president, only an honorary secretary; and exhibitors had the same voting rights as members.²²

As in the early days of most institutions, there was some jockeying for influence and control. Brown was anxious to secure his own circle of support within the club – hence his invitation to Steer to show at the club’s inaugural exhibition in the spring of 1886, and again in 1887.²³ And he was delighted to meet a potential new recruit in Sickert, who, in turn, was no less delighted to meet Brown. He grasped at once the possibilities of the situation: here was a young, unformed institution that might serve as a home for himself and his confrères. He infected Brown with something of this vision, and plans were soon afoot to seize ‘a greater, and, if possible, a dominating influence’ in the running of the club.²⁴ Sickert was able to marshal the other members of the Whistlerian faction: Starr, Menpes, and Francis James all agreed to show with the NEAC in future, as did Sickert’s brother Bernhard, and Paul Maitland.²⁵ The group’s position was further enhanced when the club’s secretary retired at the end of the year and was replaced by the 34-year-old Francis Bate. Bate was both an admirer of Whistler and a friend of Brown’s.²⁶ He joined the frequent meetings, in which Sickert took the lead, that were taking place to discuss the strategy of the planned coup. They were held in Sickert’s studio at Broadhurst Gardens, and, as Brown recalled, ‘with Sickert as host, our little conspiracies were not very sombre affairs … His gaiety was contagious, his manner charming, his wit bubbling.’²⁷ Brown, despite his seniority, found himself swept along by his young companions. Sickert later described him as having been ‘caught up by our movement as by a cow catcher on a train’.²⁸

In the first instance, Sickert seems to have viewed the infiltration of the NEAC as part of the grand Whistlerian project. He tried at every juncture to include his master in his developing plans for the club. But it was a difficult matter to achieve. Whistler, despite his problems, was still committed at Suffolk Street, and he could not very well become a member of a new body after his recent demands for exclusive loyalty to the RSBA. Nevertheless, he did consent to send a print to the NEAC’s show in the spring of 1888, and to allow Sickert to show Ellen’s canvas, A White Note.²⁹ (Sickert further reinforced the connection by exhibiting a small panel of ‘The Vale’, which cognoscenti would have recognized as Whistler’s home.) But Sickert’s horizons were no longer bounded by Chelsea. His own music-hall works took off from the example of Degas, while Steer, in a series of sun-drenched depictions of young girls at the seaside, was experimenting with ever more brilliant colours and ever more broken brushwork, inspired by a study of Monet’s technique. Sickert sought to foster these French ties and enhance the club’s prestige. Following Whistler’s own example in wooing Monet, he approached Degas. There were hopes that the great man might even be persuaded to become a member of the club. At all events, he gave permission for Sickert to exhibit the Danseuse Verte.³⁰

Sickert showed his own commitment to the new venture by sending in his largest and most daring picture to date: a tall, thin music-hall scene, some five foot by three foot, depicting Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties – Second Turn of Katie Lawrence. He could be confident that it would be accepted, since he was on the selection committee.³¹ The machinations of Brown and Bate had packed the jury, and by acting in concert they were able to determine the character of the show. As one hostile critic later recalled, a ‘new spirit made itself felt’.³² In the hanging of the show the two places of honour, in the centre of the long walls of the Dudley Gallery, were given to Steer and Sickert. It was the first of many occasions on which they appeared as the twin pillars of New English Art. As tended to happen on such occasions, the critics displayed their open-mindedness by offering a few words of faint praise for one before damning the other. Steer was represented by A Summer’s Evening, a large canvas of three nude girls on a beach that combined his radical Monet-inspired brushwork with the more familiar comforts of an idyllic scene. Though some reviewers found its agglomeration of ‘red, blue and yellow spots’ an unpardonable ‘affectation’, more were upset by Sickert’s picture.³³

His depiction of Katie Lawrence was derided as resembling ‘a marionette’, ‘a temporarily galvanised lay-figure’, and ‘an impudent wooden doll … with hands down to her knees’ and her mouth ‘twisted under her left ear’.³⁴ One paper suggested that Miss Lawrence should sue the artist for defamation.³⁵ The absence of detail, the lack of ‘finish’, the want of ‘graceful composition’, and the vulgarity of the subject matter were all resoundingly condemned.³⁶ It was acknowledged that these unfortunate traits were programmatic – the ‘affected mannerisms’ of the ‘advanced Impressionists’.³⁷ Although to many English commentators Whistler remained the prime – if not the sole – ‘Impressionist’, knowledge of the French members of the school was slowly percolating into the critical consciousness. Following several recent showings of work by Monet, Steer’s broken-colour technique was recognized as being in the French artist’s manner. And the presence of the Danseuse Verte on the walls of the Dudley Gallery ensured that a firm connection was noted between the work of Sickert and Degas.³⁸

The critic from the Magazine of Art, in a grave attempt at reasonableness, suggested that the ‘whole movement’ of Impressionism was still very much ‘an experiment, and, for the present, [should] be estimated accordingly’.³⁹ Degas’ experiment, though accounted ‘horrible’ by many, received some words of grudging praise.⁴⁰ But it was generally agreed that Sickert’s effort was an abject failure, falling below the level of even ‘conventional mediocrity’. The Pall Mall Gazette found a kind word for the painting’s ‘excellent tone’ and The Star’s anonymous reviewer (perhaps George Bernard Shaw) praised the ‘excellently painted top-hat in the right hand corner’ of the composition.⁴¹ But that was the limit of critical approbation. The fact that Sickert, with an eye to notoriety rather than sales, was asking a staggering 500 guineas for the picture only increased the sense of outrage.⁴² Within a week of the exhibition’s opening Sickert found himself, according to one paper, ‘the best abused man in London – with perhaps the sole exception of Mr Balfour’.⁴³

It was a triumph of publicity – if nothing else. The furore focused attention on to the NEAC, and it placed Sickert at the very centre of the stage. The position was both new and exciting. He was acknowledged – albeit only in London art circles – as standing in the front rank of ‘the independent, and often eccentric’ young men ‘seeking to strike out a new line and throw off the trammels of tradition – and, some would add, of respect’.⁴⁴ His attention-grabbing display at the Dudley Gallery was made more pointed the following month when the four modest landscapes that he exhibited at the RSBA failed to draw any but the most cursory critical attention.* It was to be his last association with the society for a decade. After surviving one vote of no-confidence, Whistler was finally ousted from the presidency at a packed general meeting on 4 June 1888. His followers resigned en masse. Sickert, who had never been a member, ceased to send pictures. As Whistler remarked, ‘the artists left and the British remained’.⁴⁵ For Sickert, the debacle confirmed his good sense in establishing a base at the NEAC. As he wrote to Blanche soon afterwards, affecting a tone of cool assurance, ‘Do send us again some work – the more important the better – to the New English Art Club. That will be the place I think for the young school in England. Faute de mieux.’⁴⁶

Inspired by the succès d’exécration of his Katie Lawrence picture, Sickert buried himself in his work that summer, spending many evenings drawing at Gatti’s and elsewhere.⁴⁷ The music hall became his all-but exclusive theme. Copies of Entr’acte littered his studio; photographs of star performers were affixed to his easel.⁴⁸ Ellen, with her keen admiration for Degas’ work, encouraged him in this direction. She would sometimes accompany him to the halls, and they would sup together afterwards at cheap and cheerful restaurants in Soho.⁴⁹ But when Sickert became caught up by a subject his appetite for work was all-consuming. He forgot everything else.⁵⁰ He would go out every night to study the aspects of his composition. He took to following his chosen artistes from hall to hall over the course of one evening so that he might have repeated opportunities of catching the fleeting details of some gesture or expression. It was a regime that inevitably drew him away from Ellen and the life of Broadhurst Gardens. He would return home in the early hours of the morning – after walking halfway across London – to find a sleeping house.⁵¹ He was not good at informing Ellen of his plans – indeed he was not good at making plans. He expected meals to be ready for him on the chance of his appearance, but the chance was often missed. Sometimes he would fail to turn up even when he and Ellen had guests to dinner, sending a last-minute telegram from a distant music hall to explain his absence.⁵²

He became friendly with the artistes whom he depicted: with the forthright Katie Lawrence and her unrelated namesake, Queenie; with Bessie Bellwood, the raucous, bright-eyed ‘coster genius’ who delighted the gallery with her sharp treatment of hecklers.⁵³ Sometimes he would escort them on their cab rides as they dashed across London from one hall to the next, and at the end of an evening he might go back to their lodgings for an impromptu supper of tripe and onions.⁵⁴ He came to love their world and their wit, the freedom of their unabashed engagement with life and language. He relished their sayings: Bessie Bellwood closing an argument with an irate cab driver with the remark, ‘Do you think I’m going to stand here to be insulted by a low-down, slab-sided cabman? I’m a public woman, I am!’; Katie Lawrence observing, as their cab horse began to prance, ‘Oh! A song and dance horse?’; or her succinct comment when – traversing a building site – she stubbed her toe on a brick, ‘Bugger the bricks!’ (to which a workman, who was walking behind her, replied, ‘Quite right, ma’m, quite right. Bugger the bricks!’).⁵⁵

They, for their part, were flattered by the attention of their young admirer. Not that he was a lone presence. Indeed Bessie Bellwood was the acknowledged mistress of the Duke of Manchester, who installed her in a house in Gower Street (causing, it must be supposed, some consternation amongst the high-minded denizens of that thoroughfare) and who could sometimes be seen driving her about in his brougham.⁵⁶ Sickert’s position as a painter counted for something – though art was not held in very high esteem by these theatrical performers. At one of Bessie Bellwood’s late-night ‘At Homes’ she produced an old oil painting, black with grime, that she had picked up at a junk shop. Sickert called for a bowl of hot water and a sponge and began cleaning off the dirt very gently. Bessie soon lost patience, grabbed the sponge from him, and started scrubbing away with a will, to reveal an image of St Lawrence on the griddle. When the next caller was announced she said that she couldn’t see him as she was ‘giving Lawrence a Turkish’.⁵⁷ Sickert’s own work was treated even more rudely by his models. When he asked Katie Lawrence if she would care to have one of the several life-sized portraits he had done of her, she replied, ‘No, not even to keep the wind out at the scullery door.’⁵⁸ It was for his looks, his humour, and his engaging character, that they liked him.

As they advanced, Sickert’s music-hall pictures grew avidly complex. He experimented with new and more intricate compositions; he viewed the stage from odd angles; and he played with the subtle shifts in tone and perspective effected by the smoky gilt-framed mirrors that lined the walls of his auditoria. Sickert’s fascination with reflected images and reflected light may have owed something to his glimpse of The Bar of the Folies Bergère at Manet’s studio, and perhaps more to Degas’ great interest in the whole subject.⁵⁹ But it was a theme that he took up as his own, and in exploring its possibilities his art took a stride forward in both its ambition and achievement. He became, by degrees, a master of low tones and their relations to rival even Whistler. Indeed some contemporaries came to believe that Sickert’s specific claim to ‘genius’ lay in this ‘extraordinarily sure sense of tone’.⁶⁰ Like Claude Lorrain he had, it seems, the ability to distinguish and order a greater range of light and darkness in a scene than other artists. In part, this was probably a natural gift – like the acute visual perception that allowed his grandfather to carry out his phenomenally accurate micrometer readings. But he honed his skill, and displayed his rare powers of concentration, amongst the flaring lights and dim reflections of the Old Bedford, Gatti’s, and Collins’s Music Hall, Islington Green.⁶¹

It is hard to know how far Sickert’s relations with his music-hall friends extended. It is possible, even likely, that he slept with some of his lionesses comiques: music-hall artistes had a reputation for sexual licence – the success of their acts was fuelled by the suggestive allure of sex – and Sickert from the first had been unfaithful to Ellen.⁶² Opportunity was not wanting. Sickert’s music-hall models came to the studio to pose, either for supplementary figure studies or for more formal portraits, and the unsuspecting Ellen was quite often away, down at Dunford, or off in Ireland monitoring the iniquities of British rule.⁶³ Certainly Sickert often took advantage of her absences.

He was, as his friends acknowledged, a man who ‘wanted a good deal of variety’ in his love life,⁶⁴ and he was prepared to seek it out. Some less friendly witnesses referred to him as ‘a coureur des dames’.⁶⁵ The chase seems to have ranged over the full social scale. His extravagantly good looks – particularly his beautiful hair and his kind eyes – and his extravagantly good manners gave him an extraordinary charm ‘for all women – Duchess or model’.⁶⁶ And though there is no record of his having seduced a duchess, tradition holds that he did bed at least some of his models.⁶⁷ (Even in the 1880s, when he painted few figure pictures, he regularly engaged models; Jacques-Émile Blanche remembered them as being game for jolly outings down to the Star and Garter at Richmond, and elsewhere.⁶⁸) Sickert also ‘sympathized’ with barmaids, wooing them – and bemusing them – with such impractical presents as gilt-edged editions of the classics.⁶⁹ But though the line between artist’s model, public-house worker, and prostitute was an unfixed one in late-Victorian London, Sickert does not appear to have been drawn to this milieu during his early married life.⁷⁰ Most of his affairs were, it seems, with women from his own social world. They came to Broadhurst Gardens where Ellen, ignorant of their true relations, met them ‘as friends visiting’. The infidelities either occurred elsewhere or when she was absent.⁷¹

Sickert treated his affairs lightly. He did not consider that they in any way compromised his marriage. He maintained always a perversely high regard for ‘blessed monogamy’, but believed it should be ‘reasonably tempered by the occasional caprice’.⁷² He was genuinely shocked at the idea that any unattached woman should wish him to leave Ellen for her – or, indeed, that any married woman might consider leaving her husband for him.⁷³ He liked the excitement of being in love, so he fell in love often – though, as he once remarked, ‘You can’t really love more than 2 or 3 women at a time.’⁷⁴ When a friend laughingly compared him to Shelley, ‘who thought “the more he loved the more love he had to give”’, Sickert answered ‘quite seriously, “Precisely, that is just it.”’⁷⁵ But his conception of love was less exalted than the great Romantic’s: he regarded it as no more than a diversion, to be played at ‘like a quadrille’.⁷⁶

Those mistresses rash enough to fall in love with him were almost invariably disappointed.⁷⁷ They soon discovered that his real and enduring passion was reserved for his art. An affair, to him, was no more than a stimulating recreation, a rest from the business of picture making. And picture making for Sickert had its own almost sexual thrill. He characterized the starting point of any painting as the artist’s ‘letch’ to record a particular scene (and the success of the picture could be judged on the extent to which it communicated that ‘letch’ to the viewer).⁷⁸ Throughout 1888 Sickert’s strongest and most recurrent ‘letch’ was for the darkened interiors of London’s music halls.

He stayed on in town late that summer, and was still hard at work during the first week of August when he learnt that Whistler, who had broken with Maud Franklin, was to marry Beatrice Godwin. (She had never divorced Godwin but he had died two years previously.⁷⁹) They made a happy and devoted pair. Beatrice, moreover, was supported by a close band of siblings, who could help her to provide Whistler with a new milieu, and a new stability, at a moment when – ousted from the RSBA – he might otherwise have succumbed to feelings of vulnerability and rejection. This new domestic circle came to provide a first forum for his thoughts and feelings on the great topics of his life: his work, his reputation, and his enemies. Sickert, like the other followers, found himself freer to pursue his own interests. But only so far. Even from a distance Whistler maintained a jealous watch over the doings of his disciples, ever ready to discern acts of presumption or betrayal. Sickert was fortunate to have an ally in Beatrice. She promoted his cause, and ensured that relations between master and erstwhile pupil continued happily, at least for the while.*

Soon after Whistler’s marriage Sickert went over to France for his holiday, but without Ellen. His mother had taken a house at St Valéry-en-Caux, just down the coast from Dieppe, and was there with Bernhard, Oswald, and Leonard.⁸⁰ After the pressures of his London work, Walter had a chance to unwind. He found the small fishing village ‘a nice little place to sleep & eat in’, which, as he told Blanche, was what he was ‘most anxious to do now’.⁸¹ The appetite for work, however, very soon reasserted itself. He and Bernhard spent their days in swimming and painting. It was an ideal regime, and Mrs Sickert was able to report that both her older sons ‘look & are very well’. Walter was encouraging his brother to experiment with pastel and asked Blanche to send over some special ‘glasspaper & sandpaper canvas’ from the Dieppe art-supply shop for Bernhard to work on. The medium was one of Degas’ favourites, and it was being promoted in England through a series of Pastel Exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery. Shortly before crossing to France, Walter had spent a happy hour with the gallery’s new director, Paul Deschamps, looking at some Degas pictures they had in stock. He felt confident that under the new regime the Grosvenor’s annual pastel show ‘should become a sympathetic Exhibition’.⁸² He persuaded both Blanche and Bernhard to send to it.⁸³ Strangely, though, there is scant evidence that Walter himself was working in pastel at this period. Perhaps he felt obliged to leave the ground clear for his easily discouraged brother.† Sickert concentrated his own energies on painting and drawing, producing amongst other things a bright little panel of the local butcher’s shop, its red frontage flushed in early autumnal sunshine. The motif was Whistlerian but the definition of the painting, and the boldness of the colour, brought it closer to the world of Manet and Degas.⁸⁴ He also – in a yet more obvious homage to Degas – made numerous detailed studies of a laundress working away with her smoothing iron.⁸⁵

By early October Sickert was back in London. He found the city in a state of simmering hysteria. Over the previous eight weeks, five East End prostitutes had been murdered and horribly mutilated by an unknown attacker. The two most recent victims had been discovered in the early hours of 30 September. A dedicated killer was on the loose. Theories as to his – or her – identity abounded. The press and the terrified public vied with each other to produce plausible culprits. The killer, it was thought, might be a Jewish immigrant, or a common vagrant, a released lunatic, a rogue slaughterman, a deranged butcher, a jealous prostitute, a mad doctor, or a neurotic medical student. There was even the suggestion that the killings could be the work of a giant eagle.⁸⁶ Theories were many, reliable leads few. The police, despite making numerous arrests, seemed no nearer to charging anyone. On 3 October they took the step of publishing two anonymous letters they had received from someone claiming to be the murderer. The first was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. The publication did little to advance the police investigation (it is now generally supposed that the letters were the work of a crank or a journalist), but it did provide the killer with a name – one that was at once taken up, and has never been put down since. Sickert appreciated the drama of the moment. He loved mysteries, and he knew the East End from his days acting at the Shoreditch Theatre and his more recent visits to the outlying music halls at Poplar, Canning Town, and the Mile End Road.⁸⁷ The general state of panic did nothing to curb his own nocturnal rambling. Almost as soon as he returned to London he resumed his evening studies in the stalls at Collins’s Music Hall on Islington Green.⁸⁸ He was probably more amused than alarmed when, walking home late one evening through King’s Cross, he passed a group of girls who fled from him shouting ‘Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper’. It was the only time during his life that anyone suggested that he was the killer.*

There was one more murder, that of Mary Kelly on 9 November. After that, the terror gradually subsided but, as no one was ever caught, the mystery endured. It was supposed that the killer had fled the country or committed suicide. Sickert, however, had other things to concern him. Blanche came over to London briefly for the opening of the Pastel Exhibition at the Grosvenor. He was grateful to Sickert for effecting the entrée and, in what was becoming a regular ritual of exchanges, presented his friend with a picture. The meeting gave them a chance to lay plans. Sickert hoped that Blanche might persuade his friend Helleu to become a member of the NEAC. Such an ‘incontestable mâitre’ would be a useful addition to the ranks.⁸⁹ Sickert also advised Blanche to send something to the RSBA winter show, if only ‘to keep the pot boiling’, and, forgetting the complications that must ensue, even suggested that he might submit something boring himself.⁹⁰ In the event, he recalled his duty to Whistler and felt it wisest not to offend his former master by sending to Suffolk Street. Instead he exhibited one of his small panel pictures – a view of the ‘bains du Casino’ at Dieppe – at the less contentious Institute of Painters in Oil Colours.⁹¹ It was a useful means of keeping his name, and his work, before the public.

* Whistler exhibited his painting of Ellen. Mrs Sickert thought it ‘not a scrap like her but … a fine picture and interesting’ (to Mrs Muller, 1887). The canvas was subsequently destroyed.

* Two of the pictures were, however, admired by the representatives of Liverpool’s annual Art Exhibition, and were selected for inclusion in their show at the Walker Art Gallery that autumn.

* Rose Pettigrew, a young model (sometimes used by Whistler, and etched by Sickert in 1884), recalled Beatrice advising her against having an affair with Steer, who was in love with her, on the grounds ‘that Sickert was much more clever than Steer [as] time would tell’ (Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 119).

† Sickert had sent a little ‘still life’ pastel to Les XX in 1887, but it had not attracted a great deal of attention. In a letter to Blanche, however, he does mention a dinner at the Hogarth Club in the autumn of 1888 at which Sir Coutts Lindsay, owner of the Grosvenor Gallery, asked him with ‘une naïveté et une politesse exquise’ if he had ever tried pastel – ‘!’. The level and direction of Sickert’s irony, as indicated by his exclamation mark, is difficult to gauge. Had Sickert submitted a pastel that had been rejected? Had he enjoyed an acclaimed success with a pastel elsewhere? Or had he simply not tried pastel seriously yet?

* See Postscript.

III THE LONDON IMPRESSIONISTS

You have given us a great lift.

(Walter Sickert to D. C. Thomson)

The band of ‘Followers’ that had once gathered around Whistler, or sat about the paraffin stove in Baker Street, was rapidly losing its cohesion. Menpes, already ostracized by Whistler on account of an unsanctioned sketching trip to Japan (an artistic world that had been mapped and colonized but never actually visited by the Master), became a focus for active attack when, towards the end of 1888, a series of highly complimentary articles on him and his work appeared in the press.¹ Whistler was furious, and sought to enlist Sickert’s aid in countering such unmerited publicity.² Sickert counselled restraint. He wrote to Beatrice, knowing the beneficial influence she exerted over her excitable husband: ‘Tell Jimmy not on any account to be drawn by Menpes’ rot. It is the one object he would like to achieve … He must be let severely alone. Tell Jimmy he mustn’t say good things about him because that is advertisement.’³ Whistler was never likely to take such good advice. He responded with a salvo of vituperative – even vicious – squibs in the pages of The World that damned Menpes as a talentless plagiarist. Sickert’s own friendship with Menpes did not survive this campaign of abuse. The ferocity of Whistler’s feelings would have made it difficult for anyone to remain friends with both men. Moreover, Sickert’s relationship with Menpes had always been largely fortuitous: it was fostered by their common bond with Whistler, and once that bond was broken there was little else to keep them together. Menpes, probably to Sickert’s relief, did not join the NEAC, or send any more pictures there. Another casualty from the group was William Stott of Oldham, who had been looking after Maud Franklin since the break-up of her relationship with Whistler. Incensed by what he considered to be Whistler’s shoddy treatment of his one-time mistress, he had publicly insulted his erstwhile hero one evening at the Hogarth Club, and then got into an unseemly scuffle with him.⁴ Elizabeth Armstrong also drifted out of the circle. On a sketching trip down to St Ives she had met and become engaged to the plein-air painter Stanhope Forbes, who, although still a member of the NEAC, was in stark opposition to Sickert’s faction. He disapproved of Whistler and Sickert, and urged his fiancée to disassociate herself from such bad – if amusing – influences.⁵

Sickert, with touching solicitude, constantly sought to reassure Whistler of his own enduring loyalty and support, but the main focus of his energies – and the balance of his allegiances – had subtly shifted. He was now an ‘Impressionist’ rather than merely a ‘Whistlerite’. His thoughts were concentrated on the New English Art Club; and, despite repeated solicitations, Whistler still stood out from the group.⁶ It had been supposed by several commentators that, once ousted from Suffolk Street, Whistler would find a refuge at the NEAC; but, though he continued to allow his work to be exhibited, he declined to become a member of the new body.⁷ It was said that the former President of the RSBA disdained to join a club that was so democratic as to have no president.⁸ Certainly he must have realized that he would not be able to regain the same level of command over his ‘pupil’ as he had once enjoyed.

Whistler’s absence from the NEAC gave Sickert a freer hand, and he rose in stature and assurance. In his plans for the infiltration of the NEAC – and the promotion of the ‘Impressionist clique’ – he adopted many of Whistler’s tactics, as well as something of his pose. He became a noted figure in Chelsea and beyond, conspicuous in his ‘wonderful clothes’. His ‘dashing’ dove-grey tailcoat projected an air of theatricality;⁹ and the cultivation of a splendid ‘large fair moustache’ lent him a new distinction – ‘like a French cavalryman of the day’.¹⁰ He affected a huge ribboned bow instead of a necktie, and persuaded several other members of the clique to follow this example of ‘Latin Quarter’ chic.¹¹

Beyond the advertisement of dress, he sought to publicize the aims and character of the clique. His pupillage at Tite Street had taught him much about the importance of gaining a voice in the press, even if he felt that Whistler sometimes went too far to secure such coverage (devoting precious hours on one occasion to wooing the sports reporter of the Fulham local paper in the hope of a flattering mention).¹² Sickert strove to find more sympathetic allies. Of the established critics, only the querulous and somewhat prissy Frederick Wedmore, who wrote in both the weekly Academy and the daily Standard, had any knowledge, or appreciation, of French Impressionism; but his cautious approbation would need to be backed by new – and more enthusiastic – voices. There were several clamouring to be heard. It was a time of great proliferation in the press. Cheap printing costs and an ever-expanding urban readership had led to an efflorescence of new papers and periodicals, and amongst these publications Sickert found willing supporters.

His great ally was George Moore. The author of A Modern Lover was, of course, sympathetic to the aims and ideals of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique; and although Moore’s only regular column was in The Hawk, a small-circulation paper published by his brother, his energy, his wit, and his own growing reputation as a writer striving to transpose French literary innovations into English gave him a profile out of proportion to his immediate readership. For Sickert, his great knowledge of the Parisian scene, his memories of Manet, and his friendship with Degas made him an invaluable repository of information. Sickert and the other young ‘Impressionists’ respected him enormously. They put up with his eccentricities (he had a habit of turning up unannounced at Broadhurst Gardens, to share his latest ‘very important’ discovery);* they invited him to their councils; and they listened to his views. Elie Halévy, after spending time in London with the NEAC crowd, described them as being ‘ruled over by George Moore’.¹³ As Sickert later admitted, news that Moore ‘liked, or didn’t like, one of our pictures’ flew at once ‘round the Hogarth Club … And I believe we were genuinely elated or depressed’ according to his verdict.¹⁴

Besides the oracular Moore there were several young painters who had taken to part-time reviewing.* Unsurprisingly, amongst these there were several pro-Whistlerians: the absurdity of allowing non-artists to criticize art had, after all, been one of the planks of Whistler’s attack on Ruskin. Alfred Lys Baldry, who had studied under Albert Moore and was an acknowledged admirer of Whistler, contributed regularly to a small-circulation weekly called The Artist & Journal of Home Culture. He was at once brought within the ambit of the ‘Impressionist’ group and encouraged to join the NEAC.¹⁵ Sickert made an even closer friend of the Scottish-born painter George Thomson, who shared with Steer both a studio building and an interest in Monet. Thomson was supplementing his income by writing up exhibitions for the evening papers,¹⁶ and despite a strong Aberdonian burr and a ‘rather gruffly gloomy address’ Sickert found him a ‘gentle and sympathetic’ soul.¹⁷ He too began to send to the NEAC and to promote the Impressionist cause in his articles.

Indeed it soon became a complaint against Sickert and his Impressionist clique that they were suborning critics by ‘offering wall space not for their articles but for their works’.¹⁸ But the line between critics and artists was becoming increasingly blurred. Sickert merely sought to accelerate the process and use it to his advantage – or to the advantage of his group. It was, after all, a surer path than relying on ‘letters to the editor’ or stray paragraphs in the gossip columns, as Whistler did. Sickert himself played his part, taking a position as art critic for the recently inaugurated London edition of the New York Herald.¹⁹ The post gave him a regular platform for promoting his artistic creed, as well – it must be supposed – as some welcome, if meagre, remuneration.

Reckless, opinionated, fluent, fond of specific technical details and broad generalizations, Sickert – it was soon revealed – had a gift for journalism. Words and opinions flowed from his pen. He did give some generous approbation to fellow members of the Impressionist clique, but on the whole his procedure was less direct.²⁰ One almost invariable element in his articles was a word of extravagant praise for Whistler. Matters reached such a pitch that the sub-editor of the paper, meeting Sickert in Regent Street, remonstrated: ‘See here, Mr Sickert … people are asking whether the New York Herald is a Whistler organ.’²¹ In truth, however, the regular praise for Whistler was almost always balanced or augmented by praise for Degas and for Keene.²² Sickert seems to have been concerned to produce a genealogy for his Impressionist group: Whistler and Degas were acknowledged as the founding fathers – with Steer’s hero, Monet, included upon occasion. But, though proud of such antecedents, Sickert was anxious not to place his group too squarely in the debt of recent Parisian developments. He did not want to be too easily pigeonholed as a mere follower of Continental fashion. And having proclaimed the connection he sought to blur it. The recurrent introduction of Keene’s name served to connect the group with the proud English tradition stretching back through the great eighteenth-century illustrators to Hogarth. It was a ploy sanctioned, if not suggested, by Degas. The French painter had told George Moore (and probably Sickert too) that English artists risked compromising their distinctiveness if they lost touch with their national school.²³ Degas, too, had impressed upon Sickert a conviction that all great art – however novel it might appear – stood upon the traditions of the past: that the achievements of Impressionism were not comprehensible without Poussin and Velásquez, Ingres, Millet, Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner. Sickert’s articles constantly sought to connect the movement with this illustrious heritage.

When writing explicitly about the NEAC, as he did with unabashed frequency, he emphasized both the diversity and the independence of the Impressionist clique – pointing out that not all the members were pupils of Whistler, and that not all had studied in Paris, and boasting, on the rather slender grounds that Blanche took an interest in their doings, that ‘the younger and more forward spirits of the Modern French School’ are more influenced by the ‘independent school of painting in England’ than vice versa.²⁴

Sickert continued to canvass potential new members and new exhibitors for the club – as it was by the votes of these that control of the committees could be maintained. There were several convenient sources. Brown’s position at the Westminster School of Art gave him access to a large and loyal constituency. When, at the beginning of March 1889, he was the recipient of a special dinner at the Holborn Restaurant, over a hundred people – mostly current or former pupils – were present. (Sickert made a speech.²⁵) Bate, too, had started ‘a school of Impressionists’, while Sidney Starr ran a popular class for ‘lady-pupils’.²⁶ Sickert, for his part, maintained pressure on Blanche to find members in France. Besides Helleu, two other young artists – Maurice Lobre and Jean-Louis Forain (whom Sickert had met through Degas) – expressed an interest in joining;²⁷ and within the club’s existing membership Sickert was pleased to make an ally of the Paris-trained John Singer Sargent, who was establishing an enviable reputation with his fluent, large-scale portraits of the London rich. Sargent agreed to propose Lobre for membership. It was a useful gesture. As Sickert acknowledged, he could not afford to be too active in putting people’s names forward himself, as it would provoke the hostility of the club’s conservative majority.²⁸

But, by such tactics, that conservative majority was being gradually eroded. The Impressionist clique continued to control the picture-selection process. The constitution was altered during 1889, and an eight-man ‘executive committee’ created, with Sickert, Steer, Brown, and Roussel all elected to it.²⁹ As some contemporary commentators complained, pictures by artists inimical to the aims of the group were now frequently excluded, or ‘outrageously skied’ at exhibition. In the face of such ‘intrigue and effrontery’ not a few painters resigned from the club, thus presenting the Impressionist clique with an even clearer run.³⁰

Certainly they had it very much their own way in 1889. The connection with the established leaders of French Impressionism was loudly bruited at the annual exhibition.* An uncatalogued selection of black-and-white works, almost certainly put together by Sickert, was hung in the little passage leading through to the main gallery. Besides the inevitable Keene drawings, it included several prints by Whistler (who also had a pastel in the exhibition proper), together with four of the lithographs G. W. Thornley had made from Degas’ pictures (and about which Sickert had written in the New York Herald).³¹ In addition there were also ‘a few photographs from masterpieces by Degas and Manet’.³² Building upon his success of the previous year, Sickert’s own submission to the show was another slice of popular metropolitan life: Collins’s Music Hall, Islington Green. In its composition, as in its theatrical matter, it proclaimed a continuing debt to Degas – though Sickert, playing his double game, hastened to deny the connection. From the aesthetic high ground staked out by Whistler in the Ten o’Clock Lecture, he defended himself against any suggestions that he was merely aping modern French models:

It is surely unnecessary to go so far afield as Paris to find an explanation of the fact that a Londoner should seek to render on canvas a familiar and striking scene in the midst of the town in which he lives … I found myself one night in the little hall off Islington Green. At a given moment I was intensely impressed by the pictorial beauty of the scene, created by the coincidence of a number of fortuitous elements of form and colour. A graceful girl leaning forward from the stage, to accentuate the refrain of one of the sentimental ballads so dear to the frequenters of the halls, evoked a spontaneous movement of sympathy and attention in an audience whose sombre tones threw into more brilliant relief the animated movement of the singer, bathed as she was in a ray of green limelight from the centre of the roof, and from below in the yellow radiance of the footlights.³³

The rising status of both Sickert and his group was confirmed when he, together with Starr and Steer, was invited to exhibit in the ‘British Fine Art Section’ of the Universal Exhibition, which opened in Paris that May. (Sickert sent his little panel of the red-fronted butcher’s shop³⁴.) He did not, however, dwell upon his successes. In what was becoming an established pattern, his small assertion of independence was almost immediately countered by an act of obeisance to Whistler. Sickert balanced his NEAC activities and achievements with an offer to arrange a retrospective exhibition of Whistler’s work. He also suggested an even more ambitious scheme to produce ‘a catalogue déraisonné’ of Whistler’s prints.³⁵ It was probably no less than Whistler felt he deserved. He was in ebullient mood. He had been made an ‘Honorary Member’ of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich after exhibiting at their International Art Show the previous year; and he was to be the guest of honour at two gala dinners arranged by his fellow artists that spring. The first was held in Paris on 28 April 1889, the other at the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly Circus on 1 May. Sickert attended the London event, though he did not help organize it. He was too involved with preparations for the Whistler exhibition, which opened on the same day.

The exhibition venue was an unconventional one. Sickert had been given the use of three little first-floor rooms in an old Queen Anne house at 29 Queen Square, Bloomsbury – the building was the home of the College for Working Men and Women. In this limited space he had gathered together ‘a little collection of masterpieces’: pastels, watercolours, and etchings, together with several important pictures, including the portraits of Rosa Corda, Thomas Carlyle, and the artist’s mother. From Irving, Sickert borrowed the picture of the actor as King Philip (the image that had first awakened him to Whistler’s genius). It was an impressive assemblage, as Sickert hastened to point out in the New York Herald.³⁶ For no very obvious reason the Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, was asked to open the exhibition.* Nevertheless, despite this ploy, the show was not a success. It was unable to transcend its unpropitious setting. Press coverage was scant, and visitors rare.

Amongst the few people who did attend were two Americans recently settled in London. Joseph Pennell, then in his early thirties, had already established a reputation as an accomplished draughtsman and illustrator; his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, was a prolific journalist. Together they had succeeded Shaw in writing the art criticism for The Star. They were amazed by the show, and ‘wrote urgently in the Star’, urging everyone ‘who cared for good work … to see this exhibition of “the man who has done more to influence artists than any other modern”’.³⁷ It was the first blast of what would become an almost interminable fanfare over the ensuing years, as the Pennells established themselves as the jealous champions of Whistler’s name and reputation. Their championship came to have awkward consequences for Sickert’s own relationship with Whistler but, at this early stage, he was merely happy to meet two sympathetic new critics, and grateful to them for giving the show a generous puff.

If there was a sense of disappointment about the impact of the exhibition, neither Sickert nor Whistler admitted it. They continued to see each other socially. Sickert would still be invited to lunch at Whistler’s studio, especially when his favourite ‘gumbo soup’ was being served,³⁸ and the Whistlers dined at Broadhurst Gardens.* Nevertheless, beneath the jollity, and the offers of assistance, there remained the sense that Sickert’s attention was elsewhere. Nothing came of the plans for a catalogue of Whistler’s prints: the current of Sickert’s other interests had become too strong. On 25 May 1889, Ellen and he bought Degas’ magnificent Répétition d’un Ballet sur la Scène at Christie’s in the sale of the Henry Hill collection. It was, Sickert noted, similar in composition to the ‘monochrome’ they had seen at M. Mulbacher’s apartment. They paid only £74 for it.³⁹

In June, Sickert resigned his post on the New York Herald, claiming that ‘to do the work thoroughly made too great an inroad on [his] time’.⁴⁰ The respite from journalism was only temporary. Perhaps it allowed him to take a short holiday – at some point during the summer he nipped over to Paris to see his picture at the Universal Exhibition. He went round the show with Degas. It was a thrilling, and entertaining, experience. As they crossed the Jardins du Trocadéro, where countless families were picnicking on the grass, Degas observed, ‘C’est l’âge d’or en bronze!’ They studied the British section ‘with some care’. Degas enjoyed ‘mystifying people’ by making great claims for the work of very minor artists:⁴¹ he certainly shocked Sickert by praising the handling of a waterfall painted by Frank Miles. But on the whole his comments, though barbed with wit, had a strong practical edge. He greatly admired a picture of a country christening by James Charles, but considered that it ‘would have been better on a somewhat smaller scale’.⁴² Confronted by Whistler’s Lady Archibald Campbell, he remarked of the elegantly attired lady retreating into the gloom of an undefined background, ‘Elle rentre dans la cave de Watteau.’†⁴³ (Whistler’s other submission – Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony – had been awarded the Gold Medal. It was a work of 1865, and perhaps gave Sickert a sense of how long it took for new ways of seeing and painting to be understood or appreciated.) Sadly, Degas’ verdict upon Sickert’s October Sun is unrecorded.

Time spent with Degas – visiting galleries, looking at pictures, talking of art – deepened Sickert’s awe and admiration. The exceptional cohesion, or ‘purity’ as Sickert described it, of Degas’ life made a great impression. Instead of deploying his will, his talent, and his wit to make himself ‘notorious’ – as, to some extent, Whistler had done – he remained always true to his art.⁴⁴ As Sickert remarked to Blanche, shortly after returning to London, ‘I find more & more, in half a sentence that Degas has said, guidance for years of work.’⁴⁵

Sickert’s main undertaking during the latter half of 1889 was to arrange an exhibition by the core members of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique.⁴⁶ David Croal Thomson, the young – and, as Sickert asserted, ‘fearless’ – manager of the progressive Goupil Gallery in New Bond Street, had offered them the use of his space in December. Although it was a group venture, necessitating the usual round of discussions and excited studio meetings, Sickert was, as ever, the presiding spirit and the acknowledged spokesman.⁴⁷ He helped define the limits of the group: Fred Brown, Francis Bate, Wilson Steer, Sidney Starr, Francis James, and Théodore Roussel were, of course, included; but it was probably Sickert’s influence that secured the inclusion of his brother Bernhard and George Thomson, and his indulgence that admitted Paul Maitland.⁴⁸

They chose to exhibit under the name of the ‘London Impressionists’. The title was obvious enough, perhaps even inevitable; if they had not adopted it themselves they might well have been given it by others.⁴⁹ Sickert, however, continuing the theme of his newspaper articles, worked hard to extend, if not to explode, critical preconceptions. While always admitting the eminence of Whistler and Degas, he insisted upon other perspectives and influences. When quizzed by one interviewer about what an ‘Impressionist’ was, Sickert – after some evasion – replied, ‘A definition is a terrible thing, but the meaning that we should attach to the word, if it is to stand in any way as a declaration of faith on our part, must be a very catholic one. The main article of the creed would perhaps be study and reverence for the best traditions of all time. Velasquez was an Impressionist, and Leech was an Impressionist, and Holbein was an Impressionist.’⁵⁰

Sickert planned to exhibit three complex new music-hall paintings as well as a couple of less contentious pieces. Racing to finish his pictures for the show, he drove himself into a frenzy of activity. When Blanche came over to London in the autumn he found Sickert ‘up to [his] ears in work’. Dinner was out of the question: ‘I am tied up for the week in a picture of an obscure Music Hall in a northern suburb which necessitates my going without dinner to be in my eighteenpenny stall on the stroke of eight.’⁵¹ And for most of the day he was ‘full of appointments with models and serio-comics’. He could meet his friend only for a hurried lunch ‘at one o’clock (exactly)’.

As well as sketching from the ‘eighteenpenny stalls’ and having sittings from ‘serio-comics’, Sickert deployed other elements in building up his pictures. He spent time that winter working at Heatherley’s, the old-established teaching studio in Newman Street. Although he seems, in part, to have used the school merely as a convenient central London workspace, it did offer him a chance to experiment with effects of light, or semi-darkness. One young student retained ‘lively recollections’ of his visits to the ‘dingy old academy’: ‘It was a winter of much fog and consequent gaslight, and Sickert, with his then preoccupation with “atmospherics,” was in his element.’ He rarely ‘painted from the models’, but made ‘impressionist studies of figures or groups of students seen through the murk’.*⁵²

It was hoped that George Moore might write a preface to the exhibition catalogue, but at the last moment the arrangement fell through.⁵³ Sickert dashed off a piece in his stead, commencing with a feisty attack on William Morris and the so-called decorative painting of the Pre-Raphaelite school – characterized by its ‘absence of convincing light and shade, of modelling, of aerial perspective, of sound drawing, of animation, of expression’. He insisted that what really mattered in painting was ‘that subtle attribute which painters call quality’; he dragged in the familiar names, and he ended with his most considered – and personal – definition of ‘Impressionism’:

Essentially and firstly, it is not realism. It has no wish to record any thing merely because it exists. It is not occupied in a struggle to make intensely real and solid the sordid or superficial details of the subjects it selects. It accepts, as the aim of the picture, what Edgar Allan Poe asserts to be the sole legitimate province of the poem, beauty. In its search through visible nature for the elements for this same beauty, it does not admit the narrow interpretation of the word ‘Nature’ which would stop short outside the four-mile radius [enclosing metropolitan London]. It is, on the contrary, strong in the belief that for those who live in the most wonderful and complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and the poetry which they daily see around them, by means which they believe are offered to the student in all their perfection, not so much on the canvases that yearly line our official and unofficial shows of competitive painting, as on the walls of the National Gallery.⁵⁴

The exhibition opened on 30 November 1889 to considerable critical and public interest. It achieved an almost immediate notoriety. Some fifty reviews were published, and by the end of the week the gallery was not merely crowded but ‘absolutely blocked’.⁵⁵ There were sixty-nine pictures on view, of which Sickert had contributed just four.* What the crowds made of it is uncertain. Of the critics, Moore, Baldry, the Pennells, and Frederick Wedmore rallied, of course, to the standard and lavished a great deal of generous praise on Sickert’s music-hall pictures.⁵⁶ But other voices prevailed. The vast majority of reviewers were either hostile or nonplussed. They complained of the paint-work and despaired at ‘the sheer unmitigated ugliness’ of the predominantly urban subject matter.⁵⁷

Sickert’s attempts to dissolve ‘Impressionism’ back into the whole history of art were ignored by his allies and condemned by his enemies in the press. The claim of kinship with Velázquez was treated as presumptuous nonsense.⁵⁸ Whatever their stamp, the critics, having only recently gained an outline knowledge of French Impressionism, were only too anxious to display it. The London Impressionists were ranged under the banners of their supposed masters. The influence of Monet’s technique was noted on the works of Steer, Thomson, and Bernhard Sickert. The debt owed by Roussel and Maitland to Whistler was too obvious to escape comment, while Sickert – along with Starr – was characterized as an imitator of Degas.⁵⁹

It was an outcome that Sickert had sought to avoid. But if it undermined the group’s aspirations towards originality it did not vitiate the impact of the show, or its influence. In the New Year, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts’ annual exhibition devoted a special section to the work of the ‘London Impressionists’, along with what one critic described as ‘the contributions of certain Scottish painters … whose aims are fresh enough – may one say eccentric enough? – to bear comparison with these’.⁶⁰ Sickert felt able to commend Thomson for striking ‘the timeliest and most effective blow’ yet in favour of the Impressionist cause.⁶¹

* One day Sickert was disturbed at his easel by Moore bursting in and declaring: ‘I have been reading a life of Michael Angelo, and it seems that the David was carved out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried. I could no more have carved the David out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried than I could have flown!’ (RE, 97) He also called upon Sickert for help with the great question of how to keep his trousers up. When Sickert patiently explained to him the proper use of braces, he was dumbfound at the revelation. And on another occasion he dragged Sickert and Steer from their studios to take them on an excursion to Peckham Rye, because he had determined that the heroine of the story he was working on should come from there – and he had never visited the place (ML, 26).

* Sickert also cherished hopes of George Bernard Shaw, who was then acting as art critic for the newly established Liberal evening-paper The Star. He recognized him as ‘a critic who knows an artistic hawk from the hernshaw of commerce’. Shaw’s tenure of the post, however, was brief, and his independence of spirit not readily susceptible to direction. Sickert soon dubbed him ‘George Bernard Cock-sure’ (WS to Lady Eden).

* Steer, Bate, Brown, and Roussel were all on the selection committee. Whistler, too, had been elected to it, though it is not known whether he served (Comus, 1 January 1889).

* Lord Halsbury was one of very few criminal lawyers to become Lord Chancellor. As Hardinge Giffard, QC – before his ennoblement – he had been a leading counsel in the Tichborne case, a fact that would surely have interested Sickert, and perhaps even accounts for their connection.

* The American novelist Gertrude Atherton recalled meeting them there in the late 1880s, when Whistler ‘monopolized the conversation at table’ with brilliantly witty denunciations of all the other leading artists of the day: Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Watts, and Alma-Tadema.

† ‘She is returning to Watteau’s cellar.’

* Sickert retained fond memories of Heatherley’s. When he came to fill in his Who’s Who entry in 1897, for the inaugural 1898 edition, in a deliberate snub to both the Slade and to Whistler he listed it as the sole seat of his ‘education’.

* Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall, The Oxford Music Hall, The PS Wings in the OP Mirror, and Twilight [‘The Butcher’s Shop’]; a fifth picture, Trefolium, though listed in the catalogue, was not mentioned by any of the critics and seems not to have been hung.

IV UNFASHIONABLE PORTRAITURE

Mr Walter Sickert, if not agreeable, is striking.

(Frederick Wedmore, in The Academy)

Even at the moment of establishing himself as the prophet of a new movement – as the leader of the London Impressionists and painter-inordinary to the modern music hall – Sickert was beginning to look in new directions, and towards different subjects. There was, more than likely, an economic imperative behind this shift. Aged thirty, and after six years of regular exhibiting as well as considerable publicity, Sickert was still struggling. His art earnings remained minimal.¹ His complex music-hall compositions were time consuming to produce, while their radical subject matter made them all but impossible to sell. For Ellen, the expense of funding both Sickert and Broadhurst Gardens was beginning to tell. Change became necessary on all fronts. It was decided to let the Hampstead house. With Ellen often ill and in need of sea air, and Sickert drawn increasingly back to Chelsea where Steer and most of the other London Impressionists lived, 54 Broadhurst Gardens had come to seem overlarge and underused. A tenant was soon found, and as an immediate step Ellen and Sickert moved back to the Sickert family home at Pembroke Gardens.² Although the removal from Hampstead may have been conceived as a temporary measure, they would never return. Indeed they would never live together again under a roof that was unequivocally their own.

In tandem with this relocation Sickert sought new, potentially more remunerative, avenues for his work. He surprised his old mentor Otto Scholderer by claiming that he wished he had concentrated on ‘still-life’.³ Since his early essays in flower painting he had attempted nothing in that line. And he did not return to it now. Instead he embarked upon portraiture.

It was the established wisdom of the studios that portrait commissions offered artists the surest – and richest – rewards. Whistler had supported himself by them, and it was natural for his former pupil to consider the same course. The difficulty was to make a beginning. In order to advertise his new departure, and to practise his craft, Sickert, like many before him, had to start by painting himself and his friends. He painted Steer (and Steer, who was embarked on the same course, painted him). He also adopted other, less conventional ploys. Some of his studies for music-hall pictures began to shade into portraits. Artistes already came to pose on the stage at Broadhurst Gardens; now they sat more formally. Sickert made a full-length portrait of Queenie Lawrence in evening dress – seen in the Whistlerian fashion, glancing backwards over her shoulder against a dark background. He titled it with her real name: Miss Fancourt.⁴

If Sickert’s own interests inclined him to look to the stage as a source of portrait work, the Cobden connection suggested the altogether more promising world of politics. Through Ellen, Sickert had been introduced to many of the leading figures of the old Cobdenite establishment: prosperous men who might want to be immortalized in paint. Sickert had already made a start in this direction. When Herbert Vivian had visited his studio in the autumn of 1889 he had noted a pass for the ‘Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery’ at the House of Commons and some sketches of at least one ‘well-known statesman’.⁵ Early in the New Year, Sickert and Ellen made the acquaintance of another distinguished political figure: Charles Bradlaugh, the great secularist and former Liberal MP for Northampton.⁶ On his first election to the House of Commons in 1880, Bradlaugh had provoked an outcry amongst the Tory ranks when he announced his intention of ‘affirming’ as an atheist rather than taking the ‘oath’ of allegiance. The move was blocked, and though the issue was much debated it proved intractable. Bradlaugh was allowed to remain an MP (he was re-elected four times) but his position was anomalous and he was obliged to speak from the bar of the House. Although in 1890 he had just given up his seat, he was still much involved with radical and secular causes.⁷ Sickert was greatly taken with the energetic old politician; and Bradlaugh, radical in all things, warmed not only to Sickert but also to his art: he agreed to have his portrait done.⁸ There were no formal ‘sittings’. Sickert merely sat in the corner of Bradlaugh’s study and made sketches of him while he was at work, moving about, dictating letters, and receiving visitors. From these sketches he painted a vivid likeness.⁹ The picture, together with the portraits of Steer and ‘Miss Fancourt’, were Sickert’s three submissions to the NEAC that spring.

At Sickert’s suggestion the show was not held at a conventional picture gallery but at Humphreys Mansions, a new block of flats in Knightsbridge. It was a domestic setting similar to that in which, Sickert hoped, the pictures might end up. Tea was served – a novel arrangement that nearly defeated the organizers: Sidney Starr had to dash out at the last moment when it was realized that no one had bought any milk.¹⁰ But even liquid refreshment could not persuade the critics of the success of the experiments. The large low rooms were too ill lit to allow the pictures to be seen properly.¹¹

Despite the general gloom, Sickert’s pictures were noted. His shift to portraiture was welcomed. The portrait of Bradlaugh was almost ‘universally pronounced the best likeness of Mr Bradlaugh ever painted’;¹² but Sickert’s close connection with the music-hall stage and artistic daring was not relinquished completely. Copies of his ‘London Impressionists’ catalogue preface were kept available for those visitors asking for ‘a written explanation’ of the movement.¹³ And the stage identity of ‘Miss Fancourt’ was widely reported.¹⁴ Also Steer (Sickert’s third portrait subject) was exhibiting – in a rare excursion from conventional matter – a canvas of Mme Sozo on the stage of the Tivoli. In the critical hubbub surrounding the exhibition, a new voice was heard: that of D. S. MacColl, a fiercely intelligent Scots-born artist who had taken over as art critic on The Spectator at the beginning of the year. Having trained under Fred Brown at Westminster he was enthusiastic about the experiments of the London Impressionists, and rather stunned expectations when he expressed that enthusiasm in the staid pages of the nation’s leading Conservative periodical.¹⁵ Moore, too, had gained a more prominent position, as art critic for The Speaker, from which to further the cause.¹⁶

The 1890 spring show confirmed the NEAC as the principal platform for ‘new and disputed talent’ and Sickert and Steer as its twin – and linked – stars.¹⁷ Having achieved their position, they set about exploiting it by making an attack on the citadel of established tradition. They submitted works to the Royal Academy summer show, and then, when the pictures were rejected, took out newspaper advertisements to announce the fact – a stunt that produced its own harvest of publicity.¹⁸ Barred from Burlington House, they lowered their sights to 12 Pembroke Gardens. Sickert began to hold informal weekend showings at the house of work by himself, Steer, and the other London Impressionists.¹⁹ They became a focus for young painters. Amongst those who came was a recent recruit to the NEAC, Florence Pash.

Florence was a forceful and handsome figure: tall, dark-haired, with heavy-lidded eyes. Though at twenty-eight she was two years younger than Sickert, she had established herself with remarkable assurance in the London art world. The daughter of a successful North London shoe retailer, she had studied painting briefly at South Kensington and in France under Blanche’s friend Henri Gervex, before returning home and beginning to exhibit with the RSBA and the Society of Women Artists. She had shown also at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Capable and independent, she set up her own teaching studio at 132 Sloane Street and conducted painting classes, mainly for ‘society women’.²⁰ Though too little of her work survives to judge of it clearly, she seems to have belonged in the ‘movement’. She certainly made some paintings of contemporary street scenes; and perhaps a trace of Whistlerian influence can be glimpsed behind Sickert’s description of her as ‘the principal of a flourishing academy for the propagation of spacious backgrounds’.²¹

Sickert had first met Florence in the mid 1880s when they were both showing at Suffolk Street, but it was with the new decade that the connection developed. Sickert insisted on painting her portrait, commandeering Bernhard’s studio room at Pembroke Gardens for the purpose. Ellen seems to have been away, but the work was not infrequently interrupted by the sudden appearance of Mrs Sickert, looking in to see how the picture was progressing, and by Walter’s youngest brother Leonard, who would come in on his return from school and make shy comments.²² Despite this close familial scrutiny, it is possible, even likely, that the friendship with Florence became an affair. The portrait done at Pembroke Gardens was only one of several that Sickert made of her that year. Three other paintings, as well as numerous drawings and pastels, were done at Florence’s teaching studio in Sloane Street. There were also trips together to the music halls, intimate dinners in a little restaurant near Warren Street, and tram rides to the suburbs to provide ‘a little fresh air & relaxation after a long day’s painting’.²³ Florence flattered Sickert’s vanity: sitting to him, seeking his advice on painting matters, and, so it seems, either buying his work or giving him some employment. He addressed her in an early letter as ‘Mlle L’Eleve – Mlle la modele – Mlle mon amie – Mlle la Patronne’.²⁴

One of their first excursions together was to the Royal Academy. Sickert had a commission from Art Weekly, the periodical edited by Francis Bate, for a two-part ‘signed review’ of the Summer Show.²⁵ Art Weekly was not Sickert’s only press outlet that summer. Herbert Vivian, his young journalist friend, announced plans for a ‘lively and eccentric newspaper’ to be called The Whirlwind,²⁶ and Sickert agreed to be the art critic of this satirical weekly. The first issue, published at the end of June 1890, heralded him with generous hyperbole as ‘one of the leading Impressionist painters of the age’. Sickert wrote at once to the ‘editor-proprietors’, Vivian and his partner the Hon. Stuart Erskine, protesting at the ‘shamelessness’ of this description. The letter was published in the next issue above the terse note: ‘Mr Sickert has forgotten. He wrote the paragraph himself.’²⁷ The position gave Sickert ample scope for promoting the ‘cause’, albeit amongst a limited and probably already converted readership. He wrote reviews, letters, general articles, as well as commentaries on pictures by his fellow London Impressionists. The paintings under discussion were reproduced in line-block, sometimes by Sickert himself, as ‘The Whirlwind Diploma Gallery of Modern Pictures’.

Sickert also contributed drawings of his own. His excursion into portraiture had had an effect. He was asked to provide a weekly ‘full-page cartoon … of a person of distinction, taken from life’.²⁸ His first offering was a drawing of Bradlaugh – probably a study made at the time he was painting the picture shown at the NEAC. Other ‘persons of distinction’ included Tom Potter MP (at whose table Sickert had met Herbert Vivian), Henry Labouchere, another radical politician and the editor of Truth, and the solicitor George Lewis (who, with the ingrained caution of his profession, preferred not to sign the finished picture, lest he should commit himself to something).²⁹ Sickert also approached Sir Henry Irving about a sitting.³⁰

This intensity of production could not be kept up. At the beginning of August, Sickert went over to Dieppe with the usual crowd of Cobdens and Sickerts. Florence Pash was also there, together with a Mrs Forster and her children.³¹ Though Sidney Starr (another of ‘the leading Impressionist painters of the age’) took over the position of art critic on The Whirlwind, Sickert continued to send in his ‘full-page cartoons’, finding plenty of distinguished persons amongst the holiday visitors. He drew a portrait of Blanche sitting with his dog Gyp on his knee, as well as pictures of John Lemoinne and Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, one of the Duchesse de Caracciolo’s several admirers.³²

Having maintained his portrait commitment to The Whirlwind throughout his ‘holiday’, Sickert promptly allowed it to lapse on his return to London. The sequence of drawings came to an end in mid September, leaving the editor-proprietors to apologize to their readers that owing to the ‘liveliness and eccentricity’ of Mr Sickert, they were ‘unable to publish a cartoon this week’.³³ Or indeed any other week. Only one more drawing was reproduced, a portrait of the artist Giovanni Boldini, probably done from sketches made at Dieppe, which appeared on 13 December in the short-lived periodical’s antepenultimate issue. (Having abandoned the weekly commission, Sickert did try to persuade Irving to give him a sitting anyway: ‘If you ever have an idle hour to spend & would let me know when you could come [to my studio] I need hardly say how much I should like to paint for myself a sketch, which would after all, take no longer than the line drawing I originally intended.’³⁴) Irving, it seems, did not take up the offer.

It was probably not only ‘liveliness and eccentricity’ that was keeping Sickert from his journalistic obligations that autumn. His domestic arrangements were once more in flux. Escaping from the rather cramped conditions at Pembroke Gardens, Ellen and he moved in with Jane Cobden.³⁵ She had recently bought a ‘little house’ at 10 Hereford Square, South Kensington.³⁶ Sickert also rented a separate workspace at 10 Glebe Studios, a purpose-built block in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, close to his Impressionist confrères.

Although the smart new studio was a significant expense, it was hoped that it might provide some small return. Perhaps inspired by the example of Florence Pash, Sickert determined to offer classes there. Teaching seemed a less taxing and potentially more remunerative avenue than fringe journalism, and Chelsea must have appeared a propitious setting for such an enterprise. He issued a prospectus advertising ‘Mr Walter Sickert’s Atelier’, offering daily life classes under his ‘immediate supervision’. Students were obliged to supply their own easels and ‘other materials’. Fees of seven guineas a term were ‘payable in advance’.³⁷ It is not known how many pupils turned up with their own easels, but there was one at least. Mrs Forster’s son, Francis, became a pupil of the Sickert Atelier.³⁸

Chelsea reunited Sickert with several old friends. Whistler and Beatrice were living at 21 Cheyne Walk, and Charles Keene had his cluttered, costume-filled studio in the King’s Road.³⁹ The pleasure of seeing Keene again was, however, short lived. It was an exceptionally harsh winter; Keene fell ill and, four freezing snowbound days into 1891, died. He was aged sixty-eight. On his deathbed he had sent for Sickert and Sidney Starr and let them choose any drawings of his that they liked.⁴⁰ A large crowd gathered amidst the frozen drifts at Hammersmith Cemetery to pay their respects, including many artists.⁴¹ For Sickert, it was a sad loss. Keene was the first of his three self-chosen mentors to die. He had provided a constant source of inspiration and pleasure, a reminder of the paramount importance of drawing. ‘Bad drawing’, Keene had been wont to say, ‘somehow revolts me.’⁴² Sickert might have been expected to contribute an obituary of his hero, but he held back. He felt that George Moore had written the article he would have liked to have written.⁴³ Nevertheless, he was anxious that Keene should be properly memorialized. He encouraged Blanche to write a piece for the French press and supplied him with a page of biographical anecdotes and facts.⁴⁴

Keene’s was not the only death of the New Year. Towards the end of January, Charles Bradlaugh passed away. Although Ellen wrote to his daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, sending condolences from herself, Walter, and Jane, and announcing an intention of attending the funeral at Woking, the news was not without its positive aspects.⁴⁵ Sickert, through his painting at the NEAC and The Whirlwind cartoon, had achieved a position almost as Bradlaugh’s official portraitist, which he sought to exploit in a small way by offering to paint a memorial picture of the politician’s study. And although progress was held up by the February gloom, his own initiatives were soon overtaken by the schemes of others.⁴⁶ The National Liberal Club put in hand a subscription to buy the picture exhibited at the NEAC, and a Manchester businessman commissioned a full-length posthumous portrait of Bradlaugh for presentation to the Manchester Secular Society.⁴⁷ These were Sickert’s first tastes of official approbation, and reward. They were to be enjoyed even if, beneath the sweet savour, there lurked a recognition that success had been achieved via conventional portraiture rather than through the daring representations of London’s music halls. Sickert was becoming aware of the practical demands of life – or so Ellen hoped, and he himself fondly believed. A new term began at ‘Mr Walter Sickert’s Atelier’ on 16 March.⁴⁸

The demands of work did not, of course, preclude all chance of pleasure. The convivial life of the streets and studios was always close at hand. Sickert was one of a group of local artists who banded together early in 1891 to form the Chelsea Arts Club in rooms at 181 King’s Road. It was to be, not another exhibiting society, but a social and dining club. The venture was at once a great success. Stirling Lee, a convivial sculptor, who had made a portrait medallion of Sickert, became the first club chairman,⁴⁹ and Whistler – as the doyen of Chelsea’s artistic community – was persuaded to join. But if he brought a weight of achievement to the fledgling institution, it was generally agreed that Sickert added the zest of style. Still in his magnificently moustachioed, dandified phase, he was an adornment to the rather shabby ground-floor and basement premises. More than one fellow member thought him ‘the best-looking man in the club’.⁵⁰

Chelsea was pullulating with artistic schemes and intrigues, and Sickert, enthusiastic if capricious, involved himself in many of them. There were plans for a new exhibiting group to be called the Panel Society that would show only works on paper. There would be no selection jury; members would submit their work already attached to a uniformly sized panel. It was hoped that Degas, along with various other French masters, might be persuaded to join. Sadly the scheme came to nothing.⁵¹ On a smaller scale Sickert arranged an exhibition of Steer’s work in his studio at Glebe Place. It was, as Sickert liked to boast in later years, Steer’s first one-man show.⁵²

Aside from exhibition plans Sickert’s delight in art-political intrigue found a fresh vent that spring in a concerted campaign against Hubert von Herkomer. Herkomer was a highly successful artist: founder of the flourishing Bushey School of Art, Slade Professor at Oxford, and – since the previous year – a Royal Academician. Seeking rather to overcapitalize on his name, he allowed some illustrations of his – published in a limited-edition poetry book – to be described as ‘etchings’, whereas they were in fact pen drawings mechanically reproduced by the relatively new process of photogravure. Sickert, as a printmaker, noted this economy with the truth, as did Joseph Pennell, and together they decided to stir up a controversy on the point. In this they were encouraged – even driven – by the deputy editor of the Scots Observer, Charles Whibley. He published letters from both Sickert and Pennell (as well as some from himself) pointing out Herkomer’s ploy and calling for his resignation from the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, if not from the Royal Academy as well.⁵³ After some evasions, the distinguished RA was eventually goaded into admitting his error. Sickert and Pennell felt vindicated. They had won a victory for artistic and commercial probity: at a time of rapidly evolving print technologies, correct definitions had to be maintained. For both of them, though, it was a victory that would have – in due course – a bitterly ironic sequel.

The NEAC continued to advance under Sickert’s direction. The Humphreys Mansions experiment was not repeated and they returned to the Dudley Gallery, where it was planned they would henceforth hold two exhibitions during the course of the year – one in the spring and a second in the autumn. Sickert, as ever, was active on both the selecting and hanging committees. Some six hundred pictures were sent in; only a hundred were hung. He gave space to Blanche’s portraits of ‘Miss Pash’ and Olga Caracciolo, and to Steer’s second ‘audacious’ music-hall piece: Prima Ballerina Assoluta.⁵⁴ After his own portraits of the previous year and the music-hall pictures of the year before that, Sickert showed a muted Dieppe townscape (a view of the Café des Tribunaux). The critics heaved a sigh of relief. While Steer’s picture drew most of the critical flak, Sickert’s ‘vigorous impression’ of the Dieppe streets was welcomed.⁵⁵ One reviewer called it ‘graceful, accurate and harmonious … in a low but not dismal key’ – remarking that it ‘atones for more than one music hall by the same artist’.⁵⁶ Another congratulated Sickert on keeping himself ‘free from any temptation to diverge into eccentricity’.⁵⁷ The work was still recognized as being ‘Impressionist’, but its conventional subject matter made it less threatening.

At the beginning of May, Sickert – together with Steer and Starr – was invited to give a talk on ‘Impressionism in Art’ to a meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, a gathering (at least according to its secretary, Herbert Horne) of ‘all our most thoughtful artists’.⁵⁸ William Blake Richmond was in the chair.⁵⁹ Sickert’s speech has not been preserved, but it is likely that it reiterated the terms of his 1889 catalogue preface. Starr’s views are unknown, while Steer adopted the established ploy of claiming all ‘good artists, ancient and modern’ as fellow Impressionists.⁶⁰ A slightly less familiar note was sounded by a fourth speaker. Besides the three London Impressionists, Horne had also secured the participation of Lucien Pissarro, the 28-year-old son – and pupil – of the celebrated Camille Pissarro. Lucien had recently arrived in England – so recently indeed that his command of the language was still shaky: he composed his paper in French and had it translated by Selwyn Image. He gave an historical account of the French Impressionist movement, taking it up to the ‘Neo-Impressionist’ – or pointillist – experiments of his father, Seurat, Signac, and others, stressing ‘le division du ton’ as the essential characteristic of this current Impressionist school.⁶¹

It was a narrow definition that set Sickert outside the movement – a fact that became clear to the young Pissarro when he was invited to lunch at Hereford Square. Although impressed by Sickert’s Degas pictures, he was less taken by Sickert’s own work. Writing to his father after a visit to Sickert’s Glebe Place studio, he confined himself to the single exclamation: ‘Déplorable!!’ Sickert, he considered, like most of his fellow ‘English Impressionists’, did not know a thing about Impressionism: he painted ‘à plat’ and with black on his palette.⁶² Although it is unlikely that Lucien Pissarro was as forthright in his comments to Sickert, the encounter was not propitious. No easy friendship sprang up between the two men. Amongst the group, only Steer struck Lucien as ‘a real artist’, in that he ‘divides the tones as we do’. Despite this point of agreement, and Steer’s generous praise for Camille Pissarro, Lucien was not ushered into the bosom of the New English Art Club. In part this may have been a result of his own shyness; but he was also concentrating his energies at the time, not on painting, but on printmaking and craft book-production, and was more interested in the possibilities of the proposed ‘Panel Society’, which, guided by the aesthetic Charles Ricketts, had a strong illustrative contingent.⁶³

Lucien Pissarro made no mention of seeing Ellen when he lunched with Sickert, and it is quite possible that she was away, recuperating. She had ‘overreached herself’ again and fallen ill that spring.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, along with Walter and most of the rest of the Sickert clan, she was back in Dieppe for at least part of the 1891 summer.⁶⁵ Jane was also in the party. She was being courted by the publisher, T. Fisher Unwin.⁶⁶ He was an imposing figure, tall, upright, with a beaked nose (slightly flattened at the tip) that curved out over a full beard. His air of dignity was such that it remained uncompromised even by his holiday attire of grey morning coat and straw boater.⁶⁷ His pursuit of Jane Cobden was scarcely the awkward rapture of young love (she was forty that year, he was forty-three), but there seems to have been a rather touching bashfulness about proceedings. His own family only suspected romance was in the air on account of the care he began to lavish on his beard.⁶⁸ To the crowd at Dieppe that summer matters seemed clearer. There was much speculation about if – or, rather, when – he would propose. An afternoon at the races seemed almost certain to culminate in a definite engagement. But the moment slipped by unused.⁶⁹ Unwin instead made a rather less drastic proposal. He was interested in contemporary French art (he even bought a van Gogh painting along with several other works during the early nineties) and he was eager to canvas Sickert’s opinion.⁷⁰ At Dieppe he asked Sickert to contribute an essay on ‘Modern Realism in Painting’ to a volume he was bringing out on the French realist painter, and father of the English plein-air tradition, Jules Bastien-Lepage. Amongst a selection of favourable essays, Sickert was to play devil’s advocate.

It was a welcome chance to set down some of his well-rehearsed ideas between hard covers. Sickert contrasted the practice of Bastien-Lepage – very unfavourably – with that of his slightly older contemporary, Millet. The contrast was a familiar one: while Bastien-Lepage had striven to paint photographically accurate scenes of rural life from nature, Millet had made his pictures in the studio, basing them on long observation, profound comprehension of the subject, and a few vestigial studies done on the spot – ‘a note sometimes of movement on a cigarette paper’.⁷¹ Sickert’s account of Bastien-Lepage’s method was a party piece:

To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive to truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take a large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture in hourly tête-à-tête with nature. This practice at once restricts the limits of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too quickly. You find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never working in any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is found to be almost impossible. You find that you had better confine your compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better be in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of a model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of a north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant.⁷²

The ‘truths’ gained by such a method amounted to no more than ‘a handful of tiresome little facts’. Millet’s approach offered – at least in the hands of a master like Millet (or Degas, or Whistler, or Keene) – the whole world of ‘life and spirit, light and air’.⁷³ It also produced work that had style – ‘style which is at the same time in the best traditions and strictly personal’.⁷⁴

Portraiture, as Sickert suggested, was a genre in which it was possible to paint directly from the subject. Studio conditions could be controlled, an unforced and maintainable pose could be chosen for the sitter – Sickert in his own early essays, following the example of Whistler, seems to have adopted just such a course. But he now began to explore other possibilities of approach. He returned from Dieppe to work on two portraits, one of George Moore, the other the Bradlaugh commission for Manchester. Each was different in style but both were painted away from the sitter.

The picture of Moore, which represented the critic, if not actually speaking, on the point of utterance, was made with the aid of only a couple of sittings. Moore recalled that Sickert, like Millet, proceeded by observing intensely and memorizing his impressions, and then working these up later in the studio.⁷⁵ In the case of Bradlaugh, the artistic challenge was different: the sitter was dead. Although Sickert had his studies of the elderly politician made the previous year, it had been decided that the commemorative portrait should show Bradlaugh at one of the great historical junctures of his life – speaking from the bar of the House of Commons.⁷⁶

No contemporary photographic record of the incident existed, so Sickert had to assemble the information piece by piece. He was already familiar with the interior of the House of Commons and he was able to borrow the actual suit that Bradlaugh had worn on that occasion for a model to pose in. The likeness itself he painted from a contemporary photograph.⁷⁷ It was his first engagement with the medium.

The use of photography in painting was a contentious and much debated subject. The Royal Academy, and most other societies, specifically barred works that had been painted from photographs – although it was sometimes hard to spot them. Throughout his early critical writings Sickert had consistently attacked the use of photographs by artists. His attitude was fixed in part by the fact that he saw the practice as a corruption of the already corrupt school of plein-air realism. If the early followers of Bastien-Lepage aimed at creating a pseudo-photographic exactitude in their paintings, numerous tyros were seeking to short-circuit the process by painting directly from photographs.⁷⁸

Sickert’s comments on the point were sometimes given an edge of personal spite. He lost no opportunity to denounce the unacknowledged – and unrecognized – use of photography in Mortimer Menpes’ facile topographic sketches. He contrasted ‘drawing [that] is the result of special gifts of brain and eye’ and that had been ‘arduously and painfully cultivated’ with work that has been done for the artist ‘by a machine’.⁷⁹ From the tenor of his language it seems clear that, at this date, Sickert was still unaware of Degas’ – albeit much more subtle – use of photographic sources.

He did, however, temper his criticisms when it came to portraiture, admitting that the camera might be a useful tool. In his review of the 1890 Royal Academy summer show he had praised ‘Mr Van Beers’ supremely skilful copy in oils of an admirable instantaneous photograph of M. Henri Rochefort’. There was an element of mischief in this, as Van Beers had not admitted his debt, and Sickert was showing off his own inside knowledge. He asserted that M. Rochefort had told him ‘that he gave a sitting for a photograph [to Van Beers] and no more’.⁸⁰ But some of the admiration was real. Sickert did consider the painting ‘a marvel of characterisation’ and regretted only that the original photograph could not be exhibited alongside, to reveal what had been gained by its translation into another medium.⁸¹

In the case of the Bradlaugh portrait, his own procedure was to trace the photograph carefully onto panel, and then pin the tracing up beside his easel, so that he might work from it ‘with the same freedom which an artist would use in painting from a drawing’.⁸² He made a point of announcing in the press that he was working from a photograph – and that he had got the photographer’s permission to use it.⁸³ The process was considered daring, if not outrageous. Perhaps having maintained his radical credentials through this ploy, Sickert felt able to adopt a relatively conventional approach to the actual painting – giving it a more finished surface than his earlier works. Although at almost eight foot by four foot it was by far the largest picture he had attempted, progress was quick. It had to be. The painting needed to be ready for the official unveiling at the end of September.

He finished with time to spare and was able to accompany Ellen for a short holiday in Wales. They were guests at the country house of Sir Edward Watkin in Snowdonia. The railway magnate was working on a memoir of Richard Cobden and had been consulting Ellen about details of research.⁸⁴ The hills and valleys do not seem to have engaged Sickert’s artistic imagination, but he climbed to the top of Snowdon and Cader Idris, and formed some happy memories of the place.⁸⁵ The break, moreover, was convenient as it brought him close to Lancashire for the presentation of the Bradlaugh picture on 26 September.⁸⁶

Sir Edward ‘delighted’ Sickert by insisting on accompanying him up to Manchester for the occasion.⁸⁷ It was a Saturday evening and there was a large crowd of nearly six hundred Mancunian freethinkers gathered at the Rusholme Street Hall (formerly home to the town’s Plymouth Brethren) to see the picture unveiled. On the platform – above which hung the shrouded picture – Sickert sat with Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner and various other dignitaries from the local secularist community. After the meeting was brought to order, a Mr Foote ‘delivered an eloquent and much applauded address, in the course of which he unveiled the portrait amid a burst of cheering’.⁸⁸ There were then more speeches, including a vote of thanks to Sickert proposed by Mrs Bradlaugh-Bonner, and seconded by Mr Foote. Mrs Bradlaugh-Bonner said that her father had had a ‘great admiration for Mr Sickert’ and that she had been ‘glad when she heard that he had been selected to paint the portrait, and after seeing the picture that evening was more than ever glad!’ – an assertion that was greeted with more cheers.⁸⁹ Sickert ‘briefly returned his thanks’, explaining with characteristic scrupulousness that ‘most of those present could not see [the picture] properly in the gaslight, and that in any case it could not now rightly be judged of until the colours were thoroughly dried and the picture varnished’.⁹⁰ After the formal proceedings were wrapped up, many of the audience, ignoring Sickert’s caveats, pressed onto the platform to get a better view of the portrait. They found their initial verdict confirmed: ‘general satisfaction was expressed with the force and dignity of the painter’s work’.⁹¹ It was an evening of triumph for Sickert, and a happy change from the uncomprehending hostility and much-qualified praise that too often greeted his NEAC exhibits.

Afterwards, Sir Edward took Sickert to Rose Hill, his house at Northenden, just outside Manchester. He wanted to show off his collection of ‘modern paintings’ – a mass of conventional works in gold frames, all bought from the Royal Academy summer shows – and, even worse, a portrait by Herkomer.⁹² As Sickert liked to recall, ‘[Sir Edward] asked me to be quite frank – which I was.’ Sickert was rather more impressed by a large piece of rock – ‘like the tip of a giant’s cigar’ – which formed the centrepiece of one of the flowerbeds in the garden. Sir Edward informed him that it was the top of Snowdon: the mountain was part of his property, and he had had the tip ‘sawn off and given a worthy surrounding’.⁹³

The success of the Manchester visit was not long enjoyed. On 29 September Maggie Cobden died suddenly in London after contracting pneumonia. Her health had never been robust, and she had been ill with that vague Victorian malady, neurasthenia, for the previous two years. Even so, her death came as a shock. She was only twenty-nine.⁹⁴

There was, however, scant time for grieving. It is not even certain that Sickert attended the funeral. He was busy with preparations for the NEAC’s autumn exhibition. As ever, he was on all the committees. The show opened at the end of November. Sickert’s portrait of George Moore was the most talked about picture in the exhibition. Amongst the core of kindly disposed reviewers the picture was considered as ‘the club’s masterpiece’. Wedmore praised its ‘effervescence of vitality’,⁹⁵ whilst MacColl claimed that it gave ‘three several satisfactions’:

From due distance it attracts first by its design and colour, and then arrests by its extraordinary expressiveness. Whether or not it is like its original, it is a notable piece of character painting, and suggests how powerful a weapon lies in the hand of the painter if he chooses, in paint to criticise the critic. But there is a third pleasure as well to be got from the picture, and that is when one gets, so to speak, inside the fence, and examines the handling – how the drawing is built up, the deliberate skill and subtlety of the touches.⁹⁶

It was a moot point just what Sickert’s ‘criticism’ of the critic, Moore, was. Moore in his own review was generous about the painting.⁹⁷ In private he was less polite. According to one tradition, he was very much annoyed when he first saw the picture. ‘You have made me look like a booby’, he said. ‘But you are a booby,’ was Sickert’s answer.⁹⁸ Certainly Moore had his boobyish aspects. His naivety, his vanity, his absurd enthusiasms, his technical gaffes (as when he talked of painters using Naples Yellow ‘years after it had been banned from every living palette’) were inescapable.⁹⁹ He had recently provoked the ire of Degas by publishing an article on the artist, full of colour and indiscretions. Yet for all this, Sickert still liked and admired him, and took his criticism seriously. After any NEAC opening he and Steer would still tramp down to the Dudley Gallery to examine the press-cutting book to see what Moore had said of their work.¹⁰⁰ If the portrait looked odd it must be remembered that so, too, did Moore. Even Manet’s masterly portrait of him had been jokingly titled ‘the drowned fisherman’.

The intended effect of the picture had surely been to reinforce the web of connection in the public consciousness between the Impressionist group and its most eloquent critical champion. It was a familiar enough ploy. And indeed the exhibition sought to establish, or strengthen, several other strands of significant connection. Sargent had been persuaded to lend two paintings by Monet, and Sickert (or, as the catalogue acknowledged, ‘Mrs Cobden-Sickert’) lent Degas’ Répétition d’un Ballet sur la Scène. The picture was hailed by MacColl as a ‘masterpiece’, and its exposure was called ‘an event of first-rate artistic importance’.¹⁰¹ Although the National Observer’s assertion ‘Now for the first time is a work of Degas publicly exhibited in London’ was not quite accurate, it served as a reminder of how relatively unknown Degas’ art still was at this time.¹⁰²

Sickert strove constantly to raise Degas’ profile in England. When MacColl announced that he was going over to Paris, Sickert hastened to equip him with the names and addresses of dealers and collectors who held works by Degas, so that he might gain a fuller knowledge of the artist’s work.¹⁰³ Sickert also agreed to contribute an unsigned article on Degas to the ‘Modern Men’ series in the National Observer.¹⁰⁴ This was a delicate operation. Sickert was very anxious not to offend his hero, as Moore had done. He had been uncomfortably implicated in Moore’s article, which was illustrated with a photograph of the Répétition d’un Ballet sur la Scène ‘by permission of Walter Sickert’.¹⁰⁵ This perhaps accounts for the curiously stilted and anodyne tone of the piece that appeared in the National Observer at the end of October.¹⁰⁶

After the tragedy of Maggie’s death there was happier news at the end of the year with the announcement of Jane Cobden’s engagement to Fisher Unwin. The wedding took place early in 1892 at Heyshot Church near Dunford.¹⁰⁷ Sickert was there with Ellen.¹⁰⁸ For him it was a useful thing to have an enterprising publisher as a brother-in-law. The association became a close one. After a brief honeymoon, the Cobden-Unwins and the Cobden-Sickerts all lived together at 10 Hereford Square.¹⁰⁹ Unwin for his part greatly appreciated his new connection with a Whistler-trained controversialist. Not everyone shared this view. When the volume on Bastien-Lepage appeared early that spring some critics thought it extraordinary that a book dedicated to the memory of the renowned ‘founder of modern naturalistic painting’ should contain such a frank attack on his work. One reviewer spoke of the ‘exceedingly foolish and impertinent deprecation of Lepage contributed by way of a make-weight to the volume’, adding that ‘it will suffice to say that it is from the pen of the publisher’s brother-in-law. If Mr Unwin is content to exhibit his family affection at the expense of his business sanity, it is after all more his affair than ours.’¹¹⁰ Even sympathetic critics felt that Sickert, for all his ‘admirable incisiveness and wit’, had rather overstated his case.¹¹¹ But that, of course, was the point. Exaggeration was an effective ploy, as both Unwin and Sickert recognized. The book received widespread attention, and amongst a section of the new generation of painters even ‘did much to check the vogue for Bastien-Lepage’ and to influence artists in the direction of Sickert’s own views.¹¹²

Sickert’s association with Unwin also drew him closer to the Pennells. Unwin got on well with Joseph Pennell, whom he regarded as a potential author and illustrator. The Pennells were regular guests at Hereford Square, and Sickert and Unwin attended the crowded Thursday evening receptions at the Pennells’ flat in Buckingham Street, off the Strand, where a regular ruck of artists, illustrators, writers, and journalists would gather to drink, intrigue, and shout gossip at each other.¹¹³

Sickert and Pennell’s joint campaign against Herkomer had been revived when the distinguished RA was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, an honour that they considered singularly inappropriate in the light of his ‘fraudulent attempt to sell, as etchings by himself, illustrations which [were] not etchings’.¹¹⁴ W. E. Henley, the National Observer’s irascible editor, who was delighted to keep the controversy rolling, wrote to Charles Whibley urging him to ‘keep Sickert up to the mark’.¹¹⁵ Sickert needed little encouragement. He wrote an open letter to the RSPE’s president, Seymour Haden, expressing his ‘surprise’ at Herkomer’s elevation, and announcing ‘with the profoundest regret’ the resignation of his own membership.¹¹⁶ It was the first of Sickert’s resignations. It would not be the last. Over the coming years, no artist resigned more often, or with more aplomb. As a first attempt this severance from the RSPE was well managed: modestly dramatic, artistically self-righteous, and not too self-wounding. He was etching less and less.¹¹⁷

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