Walter Sickert: A Life

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