Walter Sickert: A Life

He stayed on in town late that summer, and was still hard at work during the first week of August when he learnt that Whistler, who had broken with Maud Franklin, was to marry Beatrice Godwin. (She had never divorced Godwin but he had died two years previously.79) They made a happy and devoted pair. Beatrice, moreover, was supported by a close band of siblings, who could help her to provide Whistler with a new milieu, and a new stability, at a moment when – ousted from the RSBA – he might otherwise have succumbed to feelings of vulnerability and rejection. This new domestic circle came to provide a first forum for his thoughts and feelings on the great topics of his life: his work, his reputation, and his enemies. Sickert, like the other followers, found himself freer to pursue his own interests. But only so far. Even from a distance Whistler maintained a jealous watch over the doings of his disciples, ever ready to discern acts of presumption or betrayal. Sickert was fortunate to have an ally in Beatrice. She promoted his cause, and ensured that relations between master and erstwhile pupil continued happily, at least for the while.*

Soon after Whistler’s marriage Sickert went over to France for his holiday, but without Ellen. His mother had taken a house at St Valéry-en-Caux, just down the coast from Dieppe, and was there with Bernhard, Oswald, and Leonard.80 After the pressures of his London work, Walter had a chance to unwind. He found the small fishing village ‘a nice little place to sleep & eat in’, which, as he told Blanche, was what he was ‘most anxious to do now’.81 The appetite for work, however, very soon reasserted itself. He and Bernhard spent their days in swimming and painting. It was an ideal regime, and Mrs Sickert was able to report that both her older sons ‘look & are very well’. Walter was encouraging his brother to experiment with pastel and asked Blanche to send over some special ‘glasspaper & sandpaper canvas’ from the Dieppe art-supply shop for Bernhard to work on. The medium was one of Degas’ favourites, and it was being promoted in England through a series of Pastel Exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery. Shortly before crossing to France, Walter had spent a happy hour with the gallery’s new director, Paul Deschamps, looking at some Degas pictures they had in stock. He felt confident that under the new regime the Grosvenor’s annual pastel show ‘should become a sympathetic Exhibition’.82 He persuaded both Blanche and Bernhard to send to it.83 Strangely, though, there is scant evidence that Walter himself was working in pastel at this period. Perhaps he felt obliged to leave the ground clear for his easily discouraged brother.† Sickert concentrated his own energies on painting and drawing, producing amongst other things a bright little panel of the local butcher’s shop, its red frontage flushed in early autumnal sunshine. The motif was Whistlerian but the definition of the painting, and the boldness of the colour, brought it closer to the world of Manet and Degas.84 He also – in a yet more obvious homage to Degas – made numerous detailed studies of a laundress working away with her smoothing iron.85

By early October Sickert was back in London. He found the city in a state of simmering hysteria. Over the previous eight weeks, five East End prostitutes had been murdered and horribly mutilated by an unknown attacker. The two most recent victims had been discovered in the early hours of 30 September. A dedicated killer was on the loose. Theories as to his – or her – identity abounded. The press and the terrified public vied with each other to produce plausible culprits. The killer, it was thought, might be a Jewish immigrant, or a common vagrant, a released lunatic, a rogue slaughterman, a deranged butcher, a jealous prostitute, a mad doctor, or a neurotic medical student. There was even the suggestion that the killings could be the work of a giant eagle.86 Theories were many, reliable leads few. The police, despite making numerous arrests, seemed no nearer to charging anyone. On 3 October they took the step of publishing two anonymous letters they had received from someone claiming to be the murderer. The first was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. The publication did little to advance the police investigation (it is now generally supposed that the letters were the work of a crank or a journalist), but it did provide the killer with a name – one that was at once taken up, and has never been put down since. Sickert appreciated the drama of the moment. He loved mysteries, and he knew the East End from his days acting at the Shoreditch Theatre and his more recent visits to the outlying music halls at Poplar, Canning Town, and the Mile End Road.87 The general state of panic did nothing to curb his own nocturnal rambling. Almost as soon as he returned to London he resumed his evening studies in the stalls at Collins’s Music Hall on Islington Green.88 He was probably more amused than alarmed when, walking home late one evening through King’s Cross, he passed a group of girls who fled from him shouting ‘Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper’. It was the only time during his life that anyone suggested that he was the killer.*

There was one more murder, that of Mary Kelly on 9 November. After that, the terror gradually subsided but, as no one was ever caught, the mystery endured. It was supposed that the killer had fled the country or committed suicide. Sickert, however, had other things to concern him. Blanche came over to London briefly for the opening of the Pastel Exhibition at the Grosvenor. He was grateful to Sickert for effecting the entrée and, in what was becoming a regular ritual of exchanges, presented his friend with a picture. The meeting gave them a chance to lay plans. Sickert hoped that Blanche might persuade his friend Helleu to become a member of the NEAC. Such an ‘incontestable mâitre’ would be a useful addition to the ranks.89 Sickert also advised Blanche to send something to the RSBA winter show, if only ‘to keep the pot boiling’, and, forgetting the complications that must ensue, even suggested that he might submit something boring himself.90 In the event, he recalled his duty to Whistler and felt it wisest not to offend his former master by sending to Suffolk Street. Instead he exhibited one of his small panel pictures – a view of the ‘bains du Casino’ at Dieppe – at the less contentious Institute of Painters in Oil Colours.91 It was a useful means of keeping his name, and his work, before the public.

* Whistler exhibited his painting of Ellen. Mrs Sickert thought it ‘not a scrap like her but … a fine picture and interesting’ (to Mrs Muller, 1887). The canvas was subsequently destroyed.

* Two of the pictures were, however, admired by the representatives of Liverpool’s annual Art Exhibition, and were selected for inclusion in their show at the Walker Art Gallery that autumn.

* Rose Pettigrew, a young model (sometimes used by Whistler, and etched by Sickert in 1884), recalled Beatrice advising her against having an affair with Steer, who was in love with her, on the grounds ‘that Sickert was much more clever than Steer [as] time would tell’ (Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 119).

† Sickert had sent a little ‘still life’ pastel to Les XX in 1887, but it had not attracted a great deal of attention. In a letter to Blanche, however, he does mention a dinner at the Hogarth Club in the autumn of 1888 at which Sir Coutts Lindsay, owner of the Grosvenor Gallery, asked him with ‘une naïveté et une politesse exquise’ if he had ever tried pastel – ‘!’. The level and direction of Sickert’s irony, as indicated by his exclamation mark, is difficult to gauge. Had Sickert submitted a pastel that had been rejected? Had he enjoyed an acclaimed success with a pastel elsewhere? Or had he simply not tried pastel seriously yet?

* See Postscript.

III THE LONDON IMPRESSIONISTS

You have given us a great lift.

(Walter Sickert to D. C. Thomson)

The band of ‘Followers’ that had once gathered around Whistler, or sat about the paraffin stove in Baker Street, was rapidly losing its cohesion. Menpes, already ostracized by Whistler on account of an unsanctioned sketching trip to Japan (an artistic world that had been mapped and colonized but never actually visited by the Master), became a focus for active attack when, towards the end of 1888, a series of highly complimentary articles on him and his work appeared in the press.1 Whistler was furious, and sought to enlist Sickert’s aid in countering such unmerited publicity.2 Sickert counselled restraint. He wrote to Beatrice, knowing the beneficial influence she exerted over her excitable husband: ‘Tell Jimmy not on any account to be drawn by Menpes’ rot. It is the one object he would like to achieve … He must be let severely alone. Tell Jimmy he mustn’t say good things about him because that is advertisement.’3 Whistler was never likely to take such good advice. He responded with a salvo of vituperative – even vicious – squibs in the pages of The World that damned Menpes as a talentless plagiarist. Sickert’s own friendship with Menpes did not survive this campaign of abuse. The ferocity of Whistler’s feelings would have made it difficult for anyone to remain friends with both men. Moreover, Sickert’s relationship with Menpes had always been largely fortuitous: it was fostered by their common bond with Whistler, and once that bond was broken there was little else to keep them together. Menpes, probably to Sickert’s relief, did not join the NEAC, or send any more pictures there. Another casualty from the group was William Stott of Oldham, who had been looking after Maud Franklin since the break-up of her relationship with Whistler. Incensed by what he considered to be Whistler’s shoddy treatment of his one-time mistress, he had publicly insulted his erstwhile hero one evening at the Hogarth Club, and then got into an unseemly scuffle with him.4 Elizabeth Armstrong also drifted out of the circle. On a sketching trip down to St Ives she had met and become engaged to the plein-air painter Stanhope Forbes, who, although still a member of the NEAC, was in stark opposition to Sickert’s faction. He disapproved of Whistler and Sickert, and urged his fiancée to disassociate herself from such bad – if amusing – influences.5

Sickert, with touching solicitude, constantly sought to reassure Whistler of his own enduring loyalty and support, but the main focus of his energies – and the balance of his allegiances – had subtly shifted. He was now an ‘Impressionist’ rather than merely a ‘Whistlerite’. His thoughts were concentrated on the New English Art Club; and, despite repeated solicitations, Whistler still stood out from the group.6 It had been supposed by several commentators that, once ousted from Suffolk Street, Whistler would find a refuge at the NEAC; but, though he continued to allow his work to be exhibited, he declined to become a member of the new body.7 It was said that the former President of the RSBA disdained to join a club that was so democratic as to have no president.8 Certainly he must have realized that he would not be able to regain the same level of command over his ‘pupil’ as he had once enjoyed.

Whistler’s absence from the NEAC gave Sickert a freer hand, and he rose in stature and assurance. In his plans for the infiltration of the NEAC – and the promotion of the ‘Impressionist clique’ – he adopted many of Whistler’s tactics, as well as something of his pose. He became a noted figure in Chelsea and beyond, conspicuous in his ‘wonderful clothes’. His ‘dashing’ dove-grey tailcoat projected an air of theatricality;9 and the cultivation of a splendid ‘large fair moustache’ lent him a new distinction – ‘like a French cavalryman of the day’.10 He affected a huge ribboned bow instead of a necktie, and persuaded several other members of the clique to follow this example of ‘Latin Quarter’ chic.11

Beyond the advertisement of dress, he sought to publicize the aims and character of the clique. His pupillage at Tite Street had taught him much about the importance of gaining a voice in the press, even if he felt that Whistler sometimes went too far to secure such coverage (devoting precious hours on one occasion to wooing the sports reporter of the Fulham local paper in the hope of a flattering mention).12 Sickert strove to find more sympathetic allies. Of the established critics, only the querulous and somewhat prissy Frederick Wedmore, who wrote in both the weekly Academy and the daily Standard, had any knowledge, or appreciation, of French Impressionism; but his cautious approbation would need to be backed by new – and more enthusiastic – voices. There were several clamouring to be heard. It was a time of great proliferation in the press. Cheap printing costs and an ever-expanding urban readership had led to an efflorescence of new papers and periodicals, and amongst these publications Sickert found willing supporters.

His great ally was George Moore. The author of A Modern Lover was, of course, sympathetic to the aims and ideals of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique; and although Moore’s only regular column was in The Hawk, a small-circulation paper published by his brother, his energy, his wit, and his own growing reputation as a writer striving to transpose French literary innovations into English gave him a profile out of proportion to his immediate readership. For Sickert, his great knowledge of the Parisian scene, his memories of Manet, and his friendship with Degas made him an invaluable repository of information. Sickert and the other young ‘Impressionists’ respected him enormously. They put up with his eccentricities (he had a habit of turning up unannounced at Broadhurst Gardens, to share his latest ‘very important’ discovery);* they invited him to their councils; and they listened to his views. Elie Halévy, after spending time in London with the NEAC crowd, described them as being ‘ruled over by George Moore’.13 As Sickert later admitted, news that Moore ‘liked, or didn’t like, one of our pictures’ flew at once ‘round the Hogarth Club … And I believe we were genuinely elated or depressed’ according to his verdict.14

Besides the oracular Moore there were several young painters who had taken to part-time reviewing.* Unsurprisingly, amongst these there were several pro-Whistlerians: the absurdity of allowing non-artists to criticize art had, after all, been one of the planks of Whistler’s attack on Ruskin. Alfred Lys Baldry, who had studied under Albert Moore and was an acknowledged admirer of Whistler, contributed regularly to a small-circulation weekly called The Artist & Journal of Home Culture. He was at once brought within the ambit of the ‘Impressionist’ group and encouraged to join the NEAC.15 Sickert made an even closer friend of the Scottish-born painter George Thomson, who shared with Steer both a studio building and an interest in Monet. Thomson was supplementing his income by writing up exhibitions for the evening papers,16 and despite a strong Aberdonian burr and a ‘rather gruffly gloomy address’ Sickert found him a ‘gentle and sympathetic’ soul.17 He too began to send to the NEAC and to promote the Impressionist cause in his articles.

Indeed it soon became a complaint against Sickert and his Impressionist clique that they were suborning critics by ‘offering wall space not for their articles but for their works’.18 But the line between critics and artists was becoming increasingly blurred. Sickert merely sought to accelerate the process and use it to his advantage – or to the advantage of his group. It was, after all, a surer path than relying on ‘letters to the editor’ or stray paragraphs in the gossip columns, as Whistler did. Sickert himself played his part, taking a position as art critic for the recently inaugurated London edition of the New York Herald.19 The post gave him a regular platform for promoting his artistic creed, as well – it must be supposed – as some welcome, if meagre, remuneration.

Reckless, opinionated, fluent, fond of specific technical details and broad generalizations, Sickert – it was soon revealed – had a gift for journalism. Words and opinions flowed from his pen. He did give some generous approbation to fellow members of the Impressionist clique, but on the whole his procedure was less direct.20 One almost invariable element in his articles was a word of extravagant praise for Whistler. Matters reached such a pitch that the sub-editor of the paper, meeting Sickert in Regent Street, remonstrated: ‘See here, Mr Sickert … people are asking whether the New York Herald is a Whistler organ.’21 In truth, however, the regular praise for Whistler was almost always balanced or augmented by praise for Degas and for Keene.22 Sickert seems to have been concerned to produce a genealogy for his Impressionist group: Whistler and Degas were acknowledged as the founding fathers – with Steer’s hero, Monet, included upon occasion. But, though proud of such antecedents, Sickert was anxious not to place his group too squarely in the debt of recent Parisian developments. He did not want to be too easily pigeonholed as a mere follower of Continental fashion. And having proclaimed the connection he sought to blur it. The recurrent introduction of Keene’s name served to connect the group with the proud English tradition stretching back through the great eighteenth-century illustrators to Hogarth. It was a ploy sanctioned, if not suggested, by Degas. The French painter had told George Moore (and probably Sickert too) that English artists risked compromising their distinctiveness if they lost touch with their national school.23 Degas, too, had impressed upon Sickert a conviction that all great art – however novel it might appear – stood upon the traditions of the past: that the achievements of Impressionism were not comprehensible without Poussin and Velásquez, Ingres, Millet, Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner. Sickert’s articles constantly sought to connect the movement with this illustrious heritage.

When writing explicitly about the NEAC, as he did with unabashed frequency, he emphasized both the diversity and the independence of the Impressionist clique – pointing out that not all the members were pupils of Whistler, and that not all had studied in Paris, and boasting, on the rather slender grounds that Blanche took an interest in their doings, that ‘the younger and more forward spirits of the Modern French School’ are more influenced by the ‘independent school of painting in England’ than vice versa.24

Sickert continued to canvass potential new members and new exhibitors for the club – as it was by the votes of these that control of the committees could be maintained. There were several convenient sources. Brown’s position at the Westminster School of Art gave him access to a large and loyal constituency. When, at the beginning of March 1889, he was the recipient of a special dinner at the Holborn Restaurant, over a hundred people – mostly current or former pupils – were present. (Sickert made a speech.25) Bate, too, had started ‘a school of Impressionists’, while Sidney Starr ran a popular class for ‘lady-pupils’.26 Sickert, for his part, maintained pressure on Blanche to find members in France. Besides Helleu, two other young artists – Maurice Lobre and Jean-Louis Forain (whom Sickert had met through Degas) – expressed an interest in joining;27 and within the club’s existing membership Sickert was pleased to make an ally of the Paris-trained John Singer Sargent, who was establishing an enviable reputation with his fluent, large-scale portraits of the London rich. Sargent agreed to propose Lobre for membership. It was a useful gesture. As Sickert acknowledged, he could not afford to be too active in putting people’s names forward himself, as it would provoke the hostility of the club’s conservative majority.28

But, by such tactics, that conservative majority was being gradually eroded. The Impressionist clique continued to control the picture-selection process. The constitution was altered during 1889, and an eight-man ‘executive committee’ created, with Sickert, Steer, Brown, and Roussel all elected to it.29 As some contemporary commentators complained, pictures by artists inimical to the aims of the group were now frequently excluded, or ‘outrageously skied’ at exhibition. In the face of such ‘intrigue and effrontery’ not a few painters resigned from the club, thus presenting the Impressionist clique with an even clearer run.30

Certainly they had it very much their own way in 1889. The connection with the established leaders of French Impressionism was loudly bruited at the annual exhibition.* An uncatalogued selection of black-and-white works, almost certainly put together by Sickert, was hung in the little passage leading through to the main gallery. Besides the inevitable Keene drawings, it included several prints by Whistler (who also had a pastel in the exhibition proper), together with four of the lithographs G. W. Thornley had made from Degas’ pictures (and about which Sickert had written in the New York Herald).31 In addition there were also ‘a few photographs from masterpieces by Degas and Manet’.32 Building upon his success of the previous year, Sickert’s own submission to the show was another slice of popular metropolitan life: Collins’s Music Hall, Islington Green. In its composition, as in its theatrical matter, it proclaimed a continuing debt to Degas – though Sickert, playing his double game, hastened to deny the connection. From the aesthetic high ground staked out by Whistler in the Ten o’Clock Lecture, he defended himself against any suggestions that he was merely aping modern French models:

It is surely unnecessary to go so far afield as Paris to find an explanation of the fact that a Londoner should seek to render on canvas a familiar and striking scene in the midst of the town in which he lives … I found myself one night in the little hall off Islington Green. At a given moment I was intensely impressed by the pictorial beauty of the scene, created by the coincidence of a number of fortuitous elements of form and colour. A graceful girl leaning forward from the stage, to accentuate the refrain of one of the sentimental ballads so dear to the frequenters of the halls, evoked a spontaneous movement of sympathy and attention in an audience whose sombre tones threw into more brilliant relief the animated movement of the singer, bathed as she was in a ray of green limelight from the centre of the roof, and from below in the yellow radiance of the footlights.33

The rising status of both Sickert and his group was confirmed when he, together with Starr and Steer, was invited to exhibit in the ‘British Fine Art Section’ of the Universal Exhibition, which opened in Paris that May. (Sickert sent his little panel of the red-fronted butcher’s shop34.) He did not, however, dwell upon his successes. In what was becoming an established pattern, his small assertion of independence was almost immediately countered by an act of obeisance to Whistler. Sickert balanced his NEAC activities and achievements with an offer to arrange a retrospective exhibition of Whistler’s work. He also suggested an even more ambitious scheme to produce ‘a catalogue déraisonné’ of Whistler’s prints.35 It was probably no less than Whistler felt he deserved. He was in ebullient mood. He had been made an ‘Honorary Member’ of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich after exhibiting at their International Art Show the previous year; and he was to be the guest of honour at two gala dinners arranged by his fellow artists that spring. The first was held in Paris on 28 April 1889, the other at the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly Circus on 1 May. Sickert attended the London event, though he did not help organize it. He was too involved with preparations for the Whistler exhibition, which opened on the same day.

The exhibition venue was an unconventional one. Sickert had been given the use of three little first-floor rooms in an old Queen Anne house at 29 Queen Square, Bloomsbury – the building was the home of the College for Working Men and Women. In this limited space he had gathered together ‘a little collection of masterpieces’: pastels, watercolours, and etchings, together with several important pictures, including the portraits of Rosa Corda, Thomas Carlyle, and the artist’s mother. From Irving, Sickert borrowed the picture of the actor as King Philip (the image that had first awakened him to Whistler’s genius). It was an impressive assemblage, as Sickert hastened to point out in the New York Herald.36 For no very obvious reason the Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, was asked to open the exhibition.* Nevertheless, despite this ploy, the show was not a success. It was unable to transcend its unpropitious setting. Press coverage was scant, and visitors rare.