Walter Sickert: A Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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