Walter Sickert: A Life

* 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.