Полная версия
Walter Sickert: A Life
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.
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