Walter Sickert: A Life

Sickert also contributed drawings of his own. His excursion into portraiture had had an effect. He was asked to provide a weekly ‘full-page cartoon … of a person of distinction, taken from life’.28 His first offering was a drawing of Bradlaugh – probably a study made at the time he was painting the picture shown at the NEAC. Other ‘persons of distinction’ included Tom Potter MP (at whose table Sickert had met Herbert Vivian), Henry Labouchere, another radical politician and the editor of Truth, and the solicitor George Lewis (who, with the ingrained caution of his profession, preferred not to sign the finished picture, lest he should commit himself to something).29 Sickert also approached Sir Henry Irving about a sitting.30

This intensity of production could not be kept up. At the beginning of August, Sickert went over to Dieppe with the usual crowd of Cobdens and Sickerts. Florence Pash was also there, together with a Mrs Forster and her children.31 Though Sidney Starr (another of ‘the leading Impressionist painters of the age’) took over the position of art critic on The Whirlwind, Sickert continued to send in his ‘full-page cartoons’, finding plenty of distinguished persons amongst the holiday visitors. He drew a portrait of Blanche sitting with his dog Gyp on his knee, as well as pictures of John Lemoinne and Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, one of the Duchesse de Caracciolo’s several admirers.32

Having maintained his portrait commitment to The Whirlwind throughout his ‘holiday’, Sickert promptly allowed it to lapse on his return to London. The sequence of drawings came to an end in mid September, leaving the editor-proprietors to apologize to their readers that owing to the ‘liveliness and eccentricity’ of Mr Sickert, they were ‘unable to publish a cartoon this week’.33 Or indeed any other week. Only one more drawing was reproduced, a portrait of the artist Giovanni Boldini, probably done from sketches made at Dieppe, which appeared on 13 December in the short-lived periodical’s antepenultimate issue. (Having abandoned the weekly commission, Sickert did try to persuade Irving to give him a sitting anyway: ‘If you ever have an idle hour to spend & would let me know when you could come [to my studio] I need hardly say how much I should like to paint for myself a sketch, which would after all, take no longer than the line drawing I originally intended.’34) Irving, it seems, did not take up the offer.

It was probably not only ‘liveliness and eccentricity’ that was keeping Sickert from his journalistic obligations that autumn. His domestic arrangements were once more in flux. Escaping from the rather cramped conditions at Pembroke Gardens, Ellen and he moved in with Jane Cobden.35 She had recently bought a ‘little house’ at 10 Hereford Square, South Kensington.36 Sickert also rented a separate workspace at 10 Glebe Studios, a purpose-built block in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, close to his Impressionist confrères.

Although the smart new studio was a significant expense, it was hoped that it might provide some small return. Perhaps inspired by the example of Florence Pash, Sickert determined to offer classes there. Teaching seemed a less taxing and potentially more remunerative avenue than fringe journalism, and Chelsea must have appeared a propitious setting for such an enterprise. He issued a prospectus advertising ‘Mr Walter Sickert’s Atelier’, offering daily life classes under his ‘immediate supervision’. Students were obliged to supply their own easels and ‘other materials’. Fees of seven guineas a term were ‘payable in advance’.37 It is not known how many pupils turned up with their own easels, but there was one at least. Mrs Forster’s son, Francis, became a pupil of the Sickert Atelier.38

Chelsea reunited Sickert with several old friends. Whistler and Beatrice were living at 21 Cheyne Walk, and Charles Keene had his cluttered, costume-filled studio in the King’s Road.39 The pleasure of seeing Keene again was, however, short lived. It was an exceptionally harsh winter; Keene fell ill and, four freezing snowbound days into 1891, died. He was aged sixty-eight. On his deathbed he had sent for Sickert and Sidney Starr and let them choose any drawings of his that they liked.40 A large crowd gathered amidst the frozen drifts at Hammersmith Cemetery to pay their respects, including many artists.41 For Sickert, it was a sad loss. Keene was the first of his three self-chosen mentors to die. He had provided a constant source of inspiration and pleasure, a reminder of the paramount importance of drawing. ‘Bad drawing’, Keene had been wont to say, ‘somehow revolts me.’42 Sickert might have been expected to contribute an obituary of his hero, but he held back. He felt that George Moore had written the article he would have liked to have written.43 Nevertheless, he was anxious that Keene should be properly memorialized. He encouraged Blanche to write a piece for the French press and supplied him with a page of biographical anecdotes and facts.44

Keene’s was not the only death of the New Year. Towards the end of January, Charles Bradlaugh passed away. Although Ellen wrote to his daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, sending condolences from herself, Walter, and Jane, and announcing an intention of attending the funeral at Woking, the news was not without its positive aspects.45 Sickert, through his painting at the NEAC and The Whirlwind cartoon, had achieved a position almost as Bradlaugh’s official portraitist, which he sought to exploit in a small way by offering to paint a memorial picture of the politician’s study. And although progress was held up by the February gloom, his own initiatives were soon overtaken by the schemes of others.46 The National Liberal Club put in hand a subscription to buy the picture exhibited at the NEAC, and a Manchester businessman commissioned a full-length posthumous portrait of Bradlaugh for presentation to the Manchester Secular Society.47 These were Sickert’s first tastes of official approbation, and reward. They were to be enjoyed even if, beneath the sweet savour, there lurked a recognition that success had been achieved via conventional portraiture rather than through the daring representations of London’s music halls. Sickert was becoming aware of the practical demands of life – or so Ellen hoped, and he himself fondly believed. A new term began at ‘Mr Walter Sickert’s Atelier’ on 16 March.48

The demands of work did not, of course, preclude all chance of pleasure. The convivial life of the streets and studios was always close at hand. Sickert was one of a group of local artists who banded together early in 1891 to form the Chelsea Arts Club in rooms at 181 King’s Road. It was to be, not another exhibiting society, but a social and dining club. The venture was at once a great success. Stirling Lee, a convivial sculptor, who had made a portrait medallion of Sickert, became the first club chairman,49 and Whistler – as the doyen of Chelsea’s artistic community – was persuaded to join. But if he brought a weight of achievement to the fledgling institution, it was generally agreed that Sickert added the zest of style. Still in his magnificently moustachioed, dandified phase, he was an adornment to the rather shabby ground-floor and basement premises. More than one fellow member thought him ‘the best-looking man in the club’.50

Chelsea was pullulating with artistic schemes and intrigues, and Sickert, enthusiastic if capricious, involved himself in many of them. There were plans for a new exhibiting group to be called the Panel Society that would show only works on paper. There would be no selection jury; members would submit their work already attached to a uniformly sized panel. It was hoped that Degas, along with various other French masters, might be persuaded to join. Sadly the scheme came to nothing.51 On a smaller scale Sickert arranged an exhibition of Steer’s work in his studio at Glebe Place. It was, as Sickert liked to boast in later years, Steer’s first one-man show.52

Aside from exhibition plans Sickert’s delight in art-political intrigue found a fresh vent that spring in a concerted campaign against Hubert von Herkomer. Herkomer was a highly successful artist: founder of the flourishing Bushey School of Art, Slade Professor at Oxford, and – since the previous year – a Royal Academician. Seeking rather to overcapitalize on his name, he allowed some illustrations of his – published in a limited-edition poetry book – to be described as ‘etchings’, whereas they were in fact pen drawings mechanically reproduced by the relatively new process of photogravure. Sickert, as a printmaker, noted this economy with the truth, as did Joseph Pennell, and together they decided to stir up a controversy on the point. In this they were encouraged – even driven – by the deputy editor of the Scots Observer, Charles Whibley. He published letters from both Sickert and Pennell (as well as some from himself) pointing out Herkomer’s ploy and calling for his resignation from the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, if not from the Royal Academy as well.53 After some evasions, the distinguished RA was eventually goaded into admitting his error. Sickert and Pennell felt vindicated. They had won a victory for artistic and commercial probity: at a time of rapidly evolving print technologies, correct definitions had to be maintained. For both of them, though, it was a victory that would have – in due course – a bitterly ironic sequel.

The NEAC continued to advance under Sickert’s direction. The Humphreys Mansions experiment was not repeated and they returned to the Dudley Gallery, where it was planned they would henceforth hold two exhibitions during the course of the year – one in the spring and a second in the autumn. Sickert, as ever, was active on both the selecting and hanging committees. Some six hundred pictures were sent in; only a hundred were hung. He gave space to Blanche’s portraits of ‘Miss Pash’ and Olga Caracciolo, and to Steer’s second ‘audacious’ music-hall piece: Prima Ballerina Assoluta.54 After his own portraits of the previous year and the music-hall pictures of the year before that, Sickert showed a muted Dieppe townscape (a view of the Café des Tribunaux). The critics heaved a sigh of relief. While Steer’s picture drew most of the critical flak, Sickert’s ‘vigorous impression’ of the Dieppe streets was welcomed.55 One reviewer called it ‘graceful, accurate and harmonious … in a low but not dismal key’ – remarking that it ‘atones for more than one music hall by the same artist’.56 Another congratulated Sickert on keeping himself ‘free from any temptation to diverge into eccentricity’.57 The work was still recognized as being ‘Impressionist’, but its conventional subject matter made it less threatening.

At the beginning of May, Sickert – together with Steer and Starr – was invited to give a talk on ‘Impressionism in Art’ to a meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, a gathering (at least according to its secretary, Herbert Horne) of ‘all our most thoughtful artists’.58 William Blake Richmond was in the chair.59 Sickert’s speech has not been preserved, but it is likely that it reiterated the terms of his 1889 catalogue preface. Starr’s views are unknown, while Steer adopted the established ploy of claiming all ‘good artists, ancient and modern’ as fellow Impressionists.60 A slightly less familiar note was sounded by a fourth speaker. Besides the three London Impressionists, Horne had also secured the participation of Lucien Pissarro, the 28-year-old son – and pupil – of the celebrated Camille Pissarro. Lucien had recently arrived in England – so recently indeed that his command of the language was still shaky: he composed his paper in French and had it translated by Selwyn Image. He gave an historical account of the French Impressionist movement, taking it up to the ‘Neo-Impressionist’ – or pointillist – experiments of his father, Seurat, Signac, and others, stressing ‘le division du ton’ as the essential characteristic of this current Impressionist school.61

It was a narrow definition that set Sickert outside the movement – a fact that became clear to the young Pissarro when he was invited to lunch at Hereford Square. Although impressed by Sickert’s Degas pictures, he was less taken by Sickert’s own work. Writing to his father after a visit to Sickert’s Glebe Place studio, he confined himself to the single exclamation: ‘Déplorable!!’ Sickert, he considered, like most of his fellow ‘English Impressionists’, did not know a thing about Impressionism: he painted ‘à plat’ and with black on his palette.62 Although it is unlikely that Lucien Pissarro was as forthright in his comments to Sickert, the encounter was not propitious. No easy friendship sprang up between the two men. Amongst the group, only Steer struck Lucien as ‘a real artist’, in that he ‘divides the tones as we do’. Despite this point of agreement, and Steer’s generous praise for Camille Pissarro, Lucien was not ushered into the bosom of the New English Art Club. In part this may have been a result of his own shyness; but he was also concentrating his energies at the time, not on painting, but on printmaking and craft book-production, and was more interested in the possibilities of the proposed ‘Panel Society’, which, guided by the aesthetic Charles Ricketts, had a strong illustrative contingent.63

Lucien Pissarro made no mention of seeing Ellen when he lunched with Sickert, and it is quite possible that she was away, recuperating. She had ‘overreached herself’ again and fallen ill that spring.64 Nevertheless, along with Walter and most of the rest of the Sickert clan, she was back in Dieppe for at least part of the 1891 summer.65 Jane was also in the party. She was being courted by the publisher, T. Fisher Unwin.66 He was an imposing figure, tall, upright, with a beaked nose (slightly flattened at the tip) that curved out over a full beard. His air of dignity was such that it remained uncompromised even by his holiday attire of grey morning coat and straw boater.67 His pursuit of Jane Cobden was scarcely the awkward rapture of young love (she was forty that year, he was forty-three), but there seems to have been a rather touching bashfulness about proceedings. His own family only suspected romance was in the air on account of the care he began to lavish on his beard.68 To the crowd at Dieppe that summer matters seemed clearer. There was much speculation about if – or, rather, when – he would propose. An afternoon at the races seemed almost certain to culminate in a definite engagement. But the moment slipped by unused.69 Unwin instead made a rather less drastic proposal. He was interested in contemporary French art (he even bought a van Gogh painting along with several other works during the early nineties) and he was eager to canvas Sickert’s opinion.70 At Dieppe he asked Sickert to contribute an essay on ‘Modern Realism in Painting’ to a volume he was bringing out on the French realist painter, and father of the English plein-air tradition, Jules Bastien-Lepage. Amongst a selection of favourable essays, Sickert was to play devil’s advocate.

It was a welcome chance to set down some of his well-rehearsed ideas between hard covers. Sickert contrasted the practice of Bastien-Lepage – very unfavourably – with that of his slightly older contemporary, Millet. The contrast was a familiar one: while Bastien-Lepage had striven to paint photographically accurate scenes of rural life from nature, Millet had made his pictures in the studio, basing them on long observation, profound comprehension of the subject, and a few vestigial studies done on the spot – ‘a note sometimes of movement on a cigarette paper’.71 Sickert’s account of Bastien-Lepage’s method was a party piece:

To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive to truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take a large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture in hourly tête-à-tête with nature. This practice at once restricts the limits of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too quickly. You find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never working in any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is found to be almost impossible. You find that you had better confine your compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better be in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of a model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of a north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant.72

The ‘truths’ gained by such a method amounted to no more than ‘a handful of tiresome little facts’. Millet’s approach offered – at least in the hands of a master like Millet (or Degas, or Whistler, or Keene) – the whole world of ‘life and spirit, light and air’.73 It also produced work that had style – ‘style which is at the same time in the best traditions and strictly personal’.74

Portraiture, as Sickert suggested, was a genre in which it was possible to paint directly from the subject. Studio conditions could be controlled, an unforced and maintainable pose could be chosen for the sitter – Sickert in his own early essays, following the example of Whistler, seems to have adopted just such a course. But he now began to explore other possibilities of approach. He returned from Dieppe to work on two portraits, one of George Moore, the other the Bradlaugh commission for Manchester. Each was different in style but both were painted away from the sitter.

The picture of Moore, which represented the critic, if not actually speaking, on the point of utterance, was made with the aid of only a couple of sittings. Moore recalled that Sickert, like Millet, proceeded by observing intensely and memorizing his impressions, and then working these up later in the studio.75 In the case of Bradlaugh, the artistic challenge was different: the sitter was dead. Although Sickert had his studies of the elderly politician made the previous year, it had been decided that the commemorative portrait should show Bradlaugh at one of the great historical junctures of his life – speaking from the bar of the House of Commons.76

No contemporary photographic record of the incident existed, so Sickert had to assemble the information piece by piece. He was already familiar with the interior of the House of Commons and he was able to borrow the actual suit that Bradlaugh had worn on that occasion for a model to pose in. The likeness itself he painted from a contemporary photograph.77 It was his first engagement with the medium.

The use of photography in painting was a contentious and much debated subject. The Royal Academy, and most other societies, specifically barred works that had been painted from photographs – although it was sometimes hard to spot them. Throughout his early critical writings Sickert had consistently attacked the use of photographs by artists. His attitude was fixed in part by the fact that he saw the practice as a corruption of the already corrupt school of plein-air realism. If the early followers of Bastien-Lepage aimed at creating a pseudo-photographic exactitude in their paintings, numerous tyros were seeking to short-circuit the process by painting directly from photographs.78

Sickert’s comments on the point were sometimes given an edge of personal spite. He lost no opportunity to denounce the unacknowledged – and unrecognized – use of photography in Mortimer Menpes’ facile topographic sketches. He contrasted ‘drawing [that] is the result of special gifts of brain and eye’ and that had been ‘arduously and painfully cultivated’ with work that has been done for the artist ‘by a machine’.79 From the tenor of his language it seems clear that, at this date, Sickert was still unaware of Degas’ – albeit much more subtle – use of photographic sources.

He did, however, temper his criticisms when it came to portraiture, admitting that the camera might be a useful tool. In his review of the 1890 Royal Academy summer show he had praised ‘Mr Van Beers’ supremely skilful copy in oils of an admirable instantaneous photograph of M. Henri Rochefort’. There was an element of mischief in this, as Van Beers had not admitted his debt, and Sickert was showing off his own inside knowledge. He asserted that M. Rochefort had told him ‘that he gave a sitting for a photograph [to Van Beers] and no more’.80 But some of the admiration was real. Sickert did consider the painting ‘a marvel of characterisation’ and regretted only that the original photograph could not be exhibited alongside, to reveal what had been gained by its translation into another medium.81

In the case of the Bradlaugh portrait, his own procedure was to trace the photograph carefully onto panel, and then pin the tracing up beside his easel, so that he might work from it ‘with the same freedom which an artist would use in painting from a drawing’.82 He made a point of announcing in the press that he was working from a photograph – and that he had got the photographer’s permission to use it.83 The process was considered daring, if not outrageous. Perhaps having maintained his radical credentials through this ploy, Sickert felt able to adopt a relatively conventional approach to the actual painting – giving it a more finished surface than his earlier works. Although at almost eight foot by four foot it was by far the largest picture he had attempted, progress was quick. It had to be. The painting needed to be ready for the official unveiling at the end of September.

He finished with time to spare and was able to accompany Ellen for a short holiday in Wales. They were guests at the country house of Sir Edward Watkin in Snowdonia. The railway magnate was working on a memoir of Richard Cobden and had been consulting Ellen about details of research.84 The hills and valleys do not seem to have engaged Sickert’s artistic imagination, but he climbed to the top of Snowdon and Cader Idris, and formed some happy memories of the place.85 The break, moreover, was convenient as it brought him close to Lancashire for the presentation of the Bradlaugh picture on 26 September.86

Sir Edward ‘delighted’ Sickert by insisting on accompanying him up to Manchester for the occasion.87 It was a Saturday evening and there was a large crowd of nearly six hundred Mancunian freethinkers gathered at the Rusholme Street Hall (formerly home to the town’s Plymouth Brethren) to see the picture unveiled. On the platform – above which hung the shrouded picture – Sickert sat with Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner and various other dignitaries from the local secularist community. After the meeting was brought to order, a Mr Foote ‘delivered an eloquent and much applauded address, in the course of which he unveiled the portrait amid a burst of cheering’.88 There were then more speeches, including a vote of thanks to Sickert proposed by Mrs Bradlaugh-Bonner, and seconded by Mr Foote. Mrs Bradlaugh-Bonner said that her father had had a ‘great admiration for Mr Sickert’ and that she had been ‘glad when she heard that he had been selected to paint the portrait, and after seeing the picture that evening was more than ever glad!’ – an assertion that was greeted with more cheers.89 Sickert ‘briefly returned his thanks’, explaining with characteristic scrupulousness that ‘most of those present could not see [the picture] properly in the gaslight, and that in any case it could not now rightly be judged of until the colours were thoroughly dried and the picture varnished’.90 After the formal proceedings were wrapped up, many of the audience, ignoring Sickert’s caveats, pressed onto the platform to get a better view of the portrait. They found their initial verdict confirmed: ‘general satisfaction was expressed with the force and dignity of the painter’s work’.91 It was an evening of triumph for Sickert, and a happy change from the uncomprehending hostility and much-qualified praise that too often greeted his NEAC exhibits.

Afterwards, Sir Edward took Sickert to Rose Hill, his house at Northenden, just outside Manchester. He wanted to show off his collection of ‘modern paintings’ – a mass of conventional works in gold frames, all bought from the Royal Academy summer shows – and, even worse, a portrait by Herkomer.92 As Sickert liked to recall, ‘[Sir Edward] asked me to be quite frank – which I was.’ Sickert was rather more impressed by a large piece of rock – ‘like the tip of a giant’s cigar’ – which formed the centrepiece of one of the flowerbeds in the garden. Sir Edward informed him that it was the top of Snowdon: the mountain was part of his property, and he had had the tip ‘sawn off and given a worthy surrounding’.93