Walter Sickert: A Life

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