Walter Sickert: A Life

Amongst the few people who did attend were two Americans recently settled in London. Joseph Pennell, then in his early thirties, had already established a reputation as an accomplished draughtsman and illustrator; his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, was a prolific journalist. Together they had succeeded Shaw in writing the art criticism for The Star. They were amazed by the show, and ‘wrote urgently in the Star’, urging everyone ‘who cared for good work … to see this exhibition of “the man who has done more to influence artists than any other modern”’.37 It was the first blast of what would become an almost interminable fanfare over the ensuing years, as the Pennells established themselves as the jealous champions of Whistler’s name and reputation. Their championship came to have awkward consequences for Sickert’s own relationship with Whistler but, at this early stage, he was merely happy to meet two sympathetic new critics, and grateful to them for giving the show a generous puff.

If there was a sense of disappointment about the impact of the exhibition, neither Sickert nor Whistler admitted it. They continued to see each other socially. Sickert would still be invited to lunch at Whistler’s studio, especially when his favourite ‘gumbo soup’ was being served,38 and the Whistlers dined at Broadhurst Gardens.* Nevertheless, beneath the jollity, and the offers of assistance, there remained the sense that Sickert’s attention was elsewhere. Nothing came of the plans for a catalogue of Whistler’s prints: the current of Sickert’s other interests had become too strong. On 25 May 1889, Ellen and he bought Degas’ magnificent Répétition d’un Ballet sur la Scène at Christie’s in the sale of the Henry Hill collection. It was, Sickert noted, similar in composition to the ‘monochrome’ they had seen at M. Mulbacher’s apartment. They paid only £74 for it.39

In June, Sickert resigned his post on the New York Herald, claiming that ‘to do the work thoroughly made too great an inroad on [his] time’.40 The respite from journalism was only temporary. Perhaps it allowed him to take a short holiday – at some point during the summer he nipped over to Paris to see his picture at the Universal Exhibition. He went round the show with Degas. It was a thrilling, and entertaining, experience. As they crossed the Jardins du Trocadéro, where countless families were picnicking on the grass, Degas observed, ‘C’est l’âge d’or en bronze!’ They studied the British section ‘with some care’. Degas enjoyed ‘mystifying people’ by making great claims for the work of very minor artists:41 he certainly shocked Sickert by praising the handling of a waterfall painted by Frank Miles. But on the whole his comments, though barbed with wit, had a strong practical edge. He greatly admired a picture of a country christening by James Charles, but considered that it ‘would have been better on a somewhat smaller scale’.42 Confronted by Whistler’s Lady Archibald Campbell, he remarked of the elegantly attired lady retreating into the gloom of an undefined background, ‘Elle rentre dans la cave de Watteau.’†43 (Whistler’s other submission – Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony – had been awarded the Gold Medal. It was a work of 1865, and perhaps gave Sickert a sense of how long it took for new ways of seeing and painting to be understood or appreciated.) Sadly, Degas’ verdict upon Sickert’s October Sun is unrecorded.

Time spent with Degas – visiting galleries, looking at pictures, talking of art – deepened Sickert’s awe and admiration. The exceptional cohesion, or ‘purity’ as Sickert described it, of Degas’ life made a great impression. Instead of deploying his will, his talent, and his wit to make himself ‘notorious’ – as, to some extent, Whistler had done – he remained always true to his art.44 As Sickert remarked to Blanche, shortly after returning to London, ‘I find more & more, in half a sentence that Degas has said, guidance for years of work.’45

Sickert’s main undertaking during the latter half of 1889 was to arrange an exhibition by the core members of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique.46 David Croal Thomson, the young – and, as Sickert asserted, ‘fearless’ – manager of the progressive Goupil Gallery in New Bond Street, had offered them the use of his space in December. Although it was a group venture, necessitating the usual round of discussions and excited studio meetings, Sickert was, as ever, the presiding spirit and the acknowledged spokesman.47 He helped define the limits of the group: Fred Brown, Francis Bate, Wilson Steer, Sidney Starr, Francis James, and Théodore Roussel were, of course, included; but it was probably Sickert’s influence that secured the inclusion of his brother Bernhard and George Thomson, and his indulgence that admitted Paul Maitland.48

They chose to exhibit under the name of the ‘London Impressionists’. The title was obvious enough, perhaps even inevitable; if they had not adopted it themselves they might well have been given it by others.49 Sickert, however, continuing the theme of his newspaper articles, worked hard to extend, if not to explode, critical preconceptions. While always admitting the eminence of Whistler and Degas, he insisted upon other perspectives and influences. When quizzed by one interviewer about what an ‘Impressionist’ was, Sickert – after some evasion – replied, ‘A definition is a terrible thing, but the meaning that we should attach to the word, if it is to stand in any way as a declaration of faith on our part, must be a very catholic one. The main article of the creed would perhaps be study and reverence for the best traditions of all time. Velasquez was an Impressionist, and Leech was an Impressionist, and Holbein was an Impressionist.’50

Sickert planned to exhibit three complex new music-hall paintings as well as a couple of less contentious pieces. Racing to finish his pictures for the show, he drove himself into a frenzy of activity. When Blanche came over to London in the autumn he found Sickert ‘up to [his] ears in work’. Dinner was out of the question: ‘I am tied up for the week in a picture of an obscure Music Hall in a northern suburb which necessitates my going without dinner to be in my eighteenpenny stall on the stroke of eight.’51 And for most of the day he was ‘full of appointments with models and serio-comics’. He could meet his friend only for a hurried lunch ‘at one o’clock (exactly)’.

As well as sketching from the ‘eighteenpenny stalls’ and having sittings from ‘serio-comics’, Sickert deployed other elements in building up his pictures. He spent time that winter working at Heatherley’s, the old-established teaching studio in Newman Street. Although he seems, in part, to have used the school merely as a convenient central London workspace, it did offer him a chance to experiment with effects of light, or semi-darkness. One young student retained ‘lively recollections’ of his visits to the ‘dingy old academy’: ‘It was a winter of much fog and consequent gaslight, and Sickert, with his then preoccupation with “atmospherics,” was in his element.’ He rarely ‘painted from the models’, but made ‘impressionist studies of figures or groups of students seen through the murk’.*52

It was hoped that George Moore might write a preface to the exhibition catalogue, but at the last moment the arrangement fell through.53 Sickert dashed off a piece in his stead, commencing with a feisty attack on William Morris and the so-called decorative painting of the Pre-Raphaelite school – characterized by its ‘absence of convincing light and shade, of modelling, of aerial perspective, of sound drawing, of animation, of expression’. He insisted that what really mattered in painting was ‘that subtle attribute which painters call quality’; he dragged in the familiar names, and he ended with his most considered – and personal – definition of ‘Impressionism’:

Essentially and firstly, it is not realism. It has no wish to record any thing merely because it exists. It is not occupied in a struggle to make intensely real and solid the sordid or superficial details of the subjects it selects. It accepts, as the aim of the picture, what Edgar Allan Poe asserts to be the sole legitimate province of the poem, beauty. In its search through visible nature for the elements for this same beauty, it does not admit the narrow interpretation of the word ‘Nature’ which would stop short outside the four-mile radius [enclosing metropolitan London]. It is, on the contrary, strong in the belief that for those who live in the most wonderful and complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and the poetry which they daily see around them, by means which they believe are offered to the student in all their perfection, not so much on the canvases that yearly line our official and unofficial shows of competitive painting, as on the walls of the National Gallery.54

The exhibition opened on 30 November 1889 to considerable critical and public interest. It achieved an almost immediate notoriety. Some fifty reviews were published, and by the end of the week the gallery was not merely crowded but ‘absolutely blocked’.55 There were sixty-nine pictures on view, of which Sickert had contributed just four.* What the crowds made of it is uncertain. Of the critics, Moore, Baldry, the Pennells, and Frederick Wedmore rallied, of course, to the standard and lavished a great deal of generous praise on Sickert’s music-hall pictures.56 But other voices prevailed. The vast majority of reviewers were either hostile or nonplussed. They complained of the paint-work and despaired at ‘the sheer unmitigated ugliness’ of the predominantly urban subject matter.57

Sickert’s attempts to dissolve ‘Impressionism’ back into the whole history of art were ignored by his allies and condemned by his enemies in the press. The claim of kinship with Velázquez was treated as presumptuous nonsense.58 Whatever their stamp, the critics, having only recently gained an outline knowledge of French Impressionism, were only too anxious to display it. The London Impressionists were ranged under the banners of their supposed masters. The influence of Monet’s technique was noted on the works of Steer, Thomson, and Bernhard Sickert. The debt owed by Roussel and Maitland to Whistler was too obvious to escape comment, while Sickert – along with Starr – was characterized as an imitator of Degas.59

It was an outcome that Sickert had sought to avoid. But if it undermined the group’s aspirations towards originality it did not vitiate the impact of the show, or its influence. In the New Year, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts’ annual exhibition devoted a special section to the work of the ‘London Impressionists’, along with what one critic described as ‘the contributions of certain Scottish painters … whose aims are fresh enough – may one say eccentric enough? – to bear comparison with these’.60 Sickert felt able to commend Thomson for striking ‘the timeliest and most effective blow’ yet in favour of the Impressionist cause.61

* One day Sickert was disturbed at his easel by Moore bursting in and declaring: ‘I have been reading a life of Michael Angelo, and it seems that the David was carved out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried. I could no more have carved the David out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried than I could have flown!’ (RE, 97) He also called upon Sickert for help with the great question of how to keep his trousers up. When Sickert patiently explained to him the proper use of braces, he was dumbfound at the revelation. And on another occasion he dragged Sickert and Steer from their studios to take them on an excursion to Peckham Rye, because he had determined that the heroine of the story he was working on should come from there – and he had never visited the place (ML, 26).

* Sickert also cherished hopes of George Bernard Shaw, who was then acting as art critic for the newly established Liberal evening-paper The Star. He recognized him as ‘a critic who knows an artistic hawk from the hernshaw of commerce’. Shaw’s tenure of the post, however, was brief, and his independence of spirit not readily susceptible to direction. Sickert soon dubbed him ‘George Bernard Cock-sure’ (WS to Lady Eden).

* Steer, Bate, Brown, and Roussel were all on the selection committee. Whistler, too, had been elected to it, though it is not known whether he served (Comus, 1 January 1889).

* Lord Halsbury was one of very few criminal lawyers to become Lord Chancellor. As Hardinge Giffard, QC – before his ennoblement – he had been a leading counsel in the Tichborne case, a fact that would surely have interested Sickert, and perhaps even accounts for their connection.

* The American novelist Gertrude Atherton recalled meeting them there in the late 1880s, when Whistler ‘monopolized the conversation at table’ with brilliantly witty denunciations of all the other leading artists of the day: Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Watts, and Alma-Tadema.

† ‘She is returning to Watteau’s cellar.’

* Sickert retained fond memories of Heatherley’s. When he came to fill in his Who’s Who entry in 1897, for the inaugural 1898 edition, in a deliberate snub to both the Slade and to Whistler he listed it as the sole seat of his ‘education’.

* Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall, The Oxford Music Hall, The PS Wings in the OP Mirror, and Twilight [‘The Butcher’s Shop’]; a fifth picture, Trefolium, though listed in the catalogue, was not mentioned by any of the critics and seems not to have been hung.

IV UNFASHIONABLE PORTRAITURE

Mr Walter Sickert, if not agreeable, is striking.

(Frederick Wedmore, in The Academy)

Even at the moment of establishing himself as the prophet of a new movement – as the leader of the London Impressionists and painter-inordinary to the modern music hall – Sickert was beginning to look in new directions, and towards different subjects. There was, more than likely, an economic imperative behind this shift. Aged thirty, and after six years of regular exhibiting as well as considerable publicity, Sickert was still struggling. His art earnings remained minimal.1 His complex music-hall compositions were time consuming to produce, while their radical subject matter made them all but impossible to sell. For Ellen, the expense of funding both Sickert and Broadhurst Gardens was beginning to tell. Change became necessary on all fronts. It was decided to let the Hampstead house. With Ellen often ill and in need of sea air, and Sickert drawn increasingly back to Chelsea where Steer and most of the other London Impressionists lived, 54 Broadhurst Gardens had come to seem overlarge and underused. A tenant was soon found, and as an immediate step Ellen and Sickert moved back to the Sickert family home at Pembroke Gardens.2 Although the removal from Hampstead may have been conceived as a temporary measure, they would never return. Indeed they would never live together again under a roof that was unequivocally their own.

In tandem with this relocation Sickert sought new, potentially more remunerative, avenues for his work. He surprised his old mentor Otto Scholderer by claiming that he wished he had concentrated on ‘still-life’.3 Since his early essays in flower painting he had attempted nothing in that line. And he did not return to it now. Instead he embarked upon portraiture.

It was the established wisdom of the studios that portrait commissions offered artists the surest – and richest – rewards. Whistler had supported himself by them, and it was natural for his former pupil to consider the same course. The difficulty was to make a beginning. In order to advertise his new departure, and to practise his craft, Sickert, like many before him, had to start by painting himself and his friends. He painted Steer (and Steer, who was embarked on the same course, painted him). He also adopted other, less conventional ploys. Some of his studies for music-hall pictures began to shade into portraits. Artistes already came to pose on the stage at Broadhurst Gardens; now they sat more formally. Sickert made a full-length portrait of Queenie Lawrence in evening dress – seen in the Whistlerian fashion, glancing backwards over her shoulder against a dark background. He titled it with her real name: Miss Fancourt.4

If Sickert’s own interests inclined him to look to the stage as a source of portrait work, the Cobden connection suggested the altogether more promising world of politics. Through Ellen, Sickert had been introduced to many of the leading figures of the old Cobdenite establishment: prosperous men who might want to be immortalized in paint. Sickert had already made a start in this direction. When Herbert Vivian had visited his studio in the autumn of 1889 he had noted a pass for the ‘Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery’ at the House of Commons and some sketches of at least one ‘well-known statesman’.5 Early in the New Year, Sickert and Ellen made the acquaintance of another distinguished political figure: Charles Bradlaugh, the great secularist and former Liberal MP for Northampton.6 On his first election to the House of Commons in 1880, Bradlaugh had provoked an outcry amongst the Tory ranks when he announced his intention of ‘affirming’ as an atheist rather than taking the ‘oath’ of allegiance. The move was blocked, and though the issue was much debated it proved intractable. Bradlaugh was allowed to remain an MP (he was re-elected four times) but his position was anomalous and he was obliged to speak from the bar of the House. Although in 1890 he had just given up his seat, he was still much involved with radical and secular causes.7 Sickert was greatly taken with the energetic old politician; and Bradlaugh, radical in all things, warmed not only to Sickert but also to his art: he agreed to have his portrait done.8 There were no formal ‘sittings’. Sickert merely sat in the corner of Bradlaugh’s study and made sketches of him while he was at work, moving about, dictating letters, and receiving visitors. From these sketches he painted a vivid likeness.9 The picture, together with the portraits of Steer and ‘Miss Fancourt’, were Sickert’s three submissions to the NEAC that spring.

At Sickert’s suggestion the show was not held at a conventional picture gallery but at Humphreys Mansions, a new block of flats in Knightsbridge. It was a domestic setting similar to that in which, Sickert hoped, the pictures might end up. Tea was served – a novel arrangement that nearly defeated the organizers: Sidney Starr had to dash out at the last moment when it was realized that no one had bought any milk.10 But even liquid refreshment could not persuade the critics of the success of the experiments. The large low rooms were too ill lit to allow the pictures to be seen properly.11

Despite the general gloom, Sickert’s pictures were noted. His shift to portraiture was welcomed. The portrait of Bradlaugh was almost ‘universally pronounced the best likeness of Mr Bradlaugh ever painted’;12 but Sickert’s close connection with the music-hall stage and artistic daring was not relinquished completely. Copies of his ‘London Impressionists’ catalogue preface were kept available for those visitors asking for ‘a written explanation’ of the movement.13 And the stage identity of ‘Miss Fancourt’ was widely reported.14 Also Steer (Sickert’s third portrait subject) was exhibiting – in a rare excursion from conventional matter – a canvas of Mme Sozo on the stage of the Tivoli. In the critical hubbub surrounding the exhibition, a new voice was heard: that of D. S. MacColl, a fiercely intelligent Scots-born artist who had taken over as art critic on The Spectator at the beginning of the year. Having trained under Fred Brown at Westminster he was enthusiastic about the experiments of the London Impressionists, and rather stunned expectations when he expressed that enthusiasm in the staid pages of the nation’s leading Conservative periodical.15 Moore, too, had gained a more prominent position, as art critic for The Speaker, from which to further the cause.16

The 1890 spring show confirmed the NEAC as the principal platform for ‘new and disputed talent’ and Sickert and Steer as its twin – and linked – stars.17 Having achieved their position, they set about exploiting it by making an attack on the citadel of established tradition. They submitted works to the Royal Academy summer show, and then, when the pictures were rejected, took out newspaper advertisements to announce the fact – a stunt that produced its own harvest of publicity.18 Barred from Burlington House, they lowered their sights to 12 Pembroke Gardens. Sickert began to hold informal weekend showings at the house of work by himself, Steer, and the other London Impressionists.19 They became a focus for young painters. Amongst those who came was a recent recruit to the NEAC, Florence Pash.

Florence was a forceful and handsome figure: tall, dark-haired, with heavy-lidded eyes. Though at twenty-eight she was two years younger than Sickert, she had established herself with remarkable assurance in the London art world. The daughter of a successful North London shoe retailer, she had studied painting briefly at South Kensington and in France under Blanche’s friend Henri Gervex, before returning home and beginning to exhibit with the RSBA and the Society of Women Artists. She had shown also at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Capable and independent, she set up her own teaching studio at 132 Sloane Street and conducted painting classes, mainly for ‘society women’.20 Though too little of her work survives to judge of it clearly, she seems to have belonged in the ‘movement’. She certainly made some paintings of contemporary street scenes; and perhaps a trace of Whistlerian influence can be glimpsed behind Sickert’s description of her as ‘the principal of a flourishing academy for the propagation of spacious backgrounds’.21

Sickert had first met Florence in the mid 1880s when they were both showing at Suffolk Street, but it was with the new decade that the connection developed. Sickert insisted on painting her portrait, commandeering Bernhard’s studio room at Pembroke Gardens for the purpose. Ellen seems to have been away, but the work was not infrequently interrupted by the sudden appearance of Mrs Sickert, looking in to see how the picture was progressing, and by Walter’s youngest brother Leonard, who would come in on his return from school and make shy comments.22 Despite this close familial scrutiny, it is possible, even likely, that the friendship with Florence became an affair. The portrait done at Pembroke Gardens was only one of several that Sickert made of her that year. Three other paintings, as well as numerous drawings and pastels, were done at Florence’s teaching studio in Sloane Street. There were also trips together to the music halls, intimate dinners in a little restaurant near Warren Street, and tram rides to the suburbs to provide ‘a little fresh air & relaxation after a long day’s painting’.23 Florence flattered Sickert’s vanity: sitting to him, seeking his advice on painting matters, and, so it seems, either buying his work or giving him some employment. He addressed her in an early letter as ‘Mlle L’Eleve – Mlle la modele – Mlle mon amie – Mlle la Patronne’.24

One of their first excursions together was to the Royal Academy. Sickert had a commission from Art Weekly, the periodical edited by Francis Bate, for a two-part ‘signed review’ of the Summer Show.25 Art Weekly was not Sickert’s only press outlet that summer. Herbert Vivian, his young journalist friend, announced plans for a ‘lively and eccentric newspaper’ to be called The Whirlwind,26 and Sickert agreed to be the art critic of this satirical weekly. The first issue, published at the end of June 1890, heralded him with generous hyperbole as ‘one of the leading Impressionist painters of the age’. Sickert wrote at once to the ‘editor-proprietors’, Vivian and his partner the Hon. Stuart Erskine, protesting at the ‘shamelessness’ of this description. The letter was published in the next issue above the terse note: ‘Mr Sickert has forgotten. He wrote the paragraph himself.’27 The position gave Sickert ample scope for promoting the ‘cause’, albeit amongst a limited and probably already converted readership. He wrote reviews, letters, general articles, as well as commentaries on pictures by his fellow London Impressionists. The paintings under discussion were reproduced in line-block, sometimes by Sickert himself, as ‘The Whirlwind Diploma Gallery of Modern Pictures’.