Walter Sickert: A Life

Having been widowed in 1838 (when Oswald was only ten), Johann Jürgen seems to have done everything to encourage his only child’s artistic career. The young Oswald Adalbert showed precocious ability. In 1844, at the age of sixteen, he won a travelling scholarship to Copenhagen to study at the art academy. Once there, he revealed an independent spirit, abandoning the school’s classes after his first term and taking private tuition in ‘perspective drawing’ from the foremost Danish painter of the day, C. W. Eckersberg. He then devoted himself to working in the cast gallery for the whole of the following year. In 1846 he abandoned Denmark for the altogether more prestigious Academy at Munich.53

Oswald Sickert stayed in the Bavarian capital for the next six years, submitting himself to the rigours of the Germanic training system. He was supported by his father, who visited him on at least one occasion and encouraged him with regular letters. Each epistle ended, ‘somewhat … to his son’s irritation’, with the imprecation – the distilled essence of old Johann Jürgen Sickert’s artistic wisdom – ‘male gut und schnell’ (paint well – paint quickly).54 But Munich for all its virtues and opportunities had one great limitation: it was not Paris. The main drama, it was felt, was happening elsewhere. The students of Munich were alive to the new currents in French art; and in 1851 they even got a chance to view some of Courbet’s work at first hand when he exhibited in Munich, and perhaps even visited the city.55 Oswald Sickert and his companions soon came to idolize this new master.56 And the impact of his work prompted many of them to move to the French capital. In 1852 Oswald Sickert joined the exodus, enrolling at the Parisian teaching-studio of Thomas Couture.57

Couture was, and remains, famous for his depictions of Classical Rome. His monumental canvas, Romans of the Decadence, was the cynosure of the 1847 Salon and was bought by the Louvre. But despite his antique themes, he allied himself closely to the contemporary strains of artistic Realism. His depiction of the dissolute Romans had been intended – and taken – as a comment on the corruption of France under Louis Philippe’s rule. He retained a reputation as a radical and independent spirit and his studio was regarded as one of the most exciting in Paris. It attracted students from all over Europe, and from America too. They found Couture’s regime both liberating and challenging. His manner had a bracing informality, very different from that of other teachers. He startled more than one student with such direct criticisms as, ‘That’s horrid! If you can’t do better than that you had better stop!’58

Although he worked within the framework of tradition – the ‘good tradition’ of la bonne peinture that Sickert later described as being ‘sedulously nursed’ in that Paris of the 1850s – Couture was always open to the possibilities of new techniques and procedures.59 To young artists like Oswald Sickert who arrived from the rigorously exacting art academies of Germany, such an approach was electrifying. One young artist who came to Paris from Düsseldorf considered Couture’s teaching ‘a sublime reaction from the dry-as-dust German painting then in vogue’.60 Another thanked Couture for freeing him from ‘the niggling technique of the Germans’ as well as opening up his compositions to a much ‘broader vision & conception’.61 It was Paris that liberated Oswald Sickert. And although he was there a relatively short time (barely a year) it was, for him, a defining artistic experience: he came to regard himself as ‘more an antique Parisian than a Dane’ – or, indeed, a Bavarian.62

But of course, as in most educational establishments, it was the other students – and the place itself – that provided the real education. Oswald Sickert found himself in an exciting milieu. In Paris he had the chance to see more of Courbet’s pictures.63 He travelled in France, and discovered Dieppe as a sketching ground.64 He mixed with art students not only from Couture’s atelier but from the other studios as well. There was a strong Munich contingent, including Wilhelm Füssli, Moritz Delft and Cesar Willich, as well as others from Altona, including – from 1853 – Johannes Schumacher.65

It was Schumacher who, on one of their return visits to Altona, introduced the 24-year-old Oswald Sickert to the family houseguest, Eleanor Henry.66 The Eleanor he met was an accomplished young woman of twenty-two, vivacious, attractive, and with beautiful fair hair. Oswald Sickert, for his part, was touched with the metropolitan glamour of Paris. He had a fine beard and, despite a retiring manner, seems to have been considered rather a dashing figure by the young ladies of Altona. (Preserved amongst his papers is one letter from an admirer – not Eleanor Henry – who addressed him with more poetic ardour than geo-political exactness as ‘Dear German Lord Byron’.67) It was not, however, his romantic looks, nor even his fledgling artistic reputation, that seems to have drawn Eleanor Henry to him. It was music. They shared a common passion. Oswald Sickert played the piano with real sensitivity and skill. According to one exacting critic, his ‘technique was faulty, but his phrasing was musicianly, and … for passion and for singing quality in cantabile passages he excelled many public performers’. He had a strong sense of rhythm and was a ‘brilliant’ sight-reader.68 Eleanor, the dancer’s daughter, had her own sense of rhythm and allied it to a beautiful singing voice. Their romance flourished to an accompaniment of Schubert lieder.

Even amongst the romantically inclined young people of Altona, however, it was recognized that Eleanor’s social position was problematic. Although the exact details of her background remained vague, it had become known that she was illegitimate. This, to the conventional mid nineteenth-century mind, was an all-but-ineradicable stain, a bar to any full social acceptance. But to the young Oswald Sickert, brought up in the world of art, schooled in the studios of Copenhagen, Munich, and Paris, such considerations counted for little besides the more real attractions of Eleanor’s character and person.69 He was happy to overlook the supposed taint.*

Oswald was more concerned that Eleanor’s guardian might not favour the suit of an as yet unknown Danish artist for the hand of his ward. There were, however, encouraging signs. Johannes Schumacher – himself quite as unknown as Oswald Sickert – had fallen in love with another member of Altona’s international colony, an English girl called Annie Williams. He wanted to propose to her but had received no encouragement from Mr Williams, who insisted that Johannes first prove he was capable of supporting a wife. Johannes had sought Richard Sheepshanks’ advice on the matter and had been much heartened by his tone of encouragement. It was a tone backed up with practical assistance. Sheepshanks commissioned a picture from his young friend and sent him a cheque for £100.70 This positive attitude towards the romance of one impecunious painter and an English girl with prospects must have given Oswald Sickert some small grounds for optimism.

That optimism was soon tested. In the summer of 1855, Richard Sheepshanks announced that he wished to take Eleanor on a tour of France and Italy. They would travel together with his sister Anne. Eleanor, however, was to meet her father at once in Paris. It was the news of her imminent departure from Altona that precipitated Oswald Sickert to declare his love. He proposed and was accepted. Eleanor was touched not only by the earnestness of his suit but by his willingness to overlook her doubtful status. Nevertheless, she must have had some doubts about how her father would take the news. The engagement was not disclosed. She travelled to France with it as a secret.71

The reunion with her father in Paris was a happy and exciting one. Plans for the trip were discussed and, while they waited for Anne to arrive, Richard took Eleanor around the shops to equip her with a new wardrobe. They bought dresses, and lace, and jewellery. In this congenial atmosphere of confidence and acceptance, Eleanor relaxed. She confided the secret of her engagement to her father. The effect was devastating. He ordered her to break the attachment. When she declined, he became furious. Eleanor was reduced to tears but refused to yield. Richard, behaving in the manner traditional to irate parents, cancelled the proposed European holiday. He refused to allow Eleanor to return to Altona but sent her back instead to lodge with Mrs Slee at Dieppe. Although at twenty-four she would have been more a staff member than a pupil, the ignominy of her abrupt return, the exchange of the gay whirl of Altona for the institutionalized tedium of a Dieppoise boarding school (even one as sympathetic as Mrs Slee’s), and the separation both from her beloved fiance and her new-found father, must have been painful.72

The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks, ignoring any counsels of clemency, went back to England. By post he continued to rain down further reproaches upon Eleanor, until – on 29 July – he was struck down by a sudden paralysis. After lying for a week unable to talk or move, he died at his house in Reading. He was just sixty. Eleanor blamed herself. Away in Dieppe, she was convinced that it was her untimely announcement of her engagement that had precipitated the stroke. Medical opinion took a different view, while Richard’s friends were convinced that he had overstrained his constitution with his work on the Standard Yard. But such notions, if they reached Neuville, did little to console the distressed Nelly.73

Richard Sheepshanks had, at the time he first revealed his parentage, planned to alter his will in order to make provision for Eleanor. But he died before he did so. His sister Anne was his sole legatee. She had managed his affairs and shared his interests throughout his life, and she now readily took up the burden of his responsibilities. Eleanor became her charge. Miss Sheepshanks, unlike her brother, was not implacably opposed to Oswald Sickert’s suit – although she perhaps felt that it should be tested by the trials of time and distance. At any event, she arranged for Eleanor, after she had recovered from the shock of the moment, to go as a parlour-boarder to a ‘first-class’ school in Paris; and by 1857 she had found her a post as resident governess to the two daughters of George Harris, a Harrow schoolmaster, with a salary of £100 a year.74

Oswald Sickert, meanwhile, did not lose heart. He kept in touch with Eleanor and he persevered with his painting. There were modest successes. His scenes of contemporary agricultural life seem to have combined a fashionable ‘Realismus’ with a traditional German taste for landscape.75 He had a picture accepted by the Berlin Academy in 1856, and the following year he showed at the Kiel Kunsthalle, where the ‘fluent tone’ and ‘mood’ of his work was praised.76 Also in 1857 he exhibited a picture at the British Institute in London, and it is probable that he came over to see it, and Eleanor.77 He was dividing his time between Altona and Munich.78 He worked hard and his career advanced – but at a frustratingly slow pace. The market was crowded and sales were hard to get.

Eventually, he was obliged to compromise. In a bid to prove his ability to support a wife he returned to Munich and took a job on the Fliegende Blätter, a periodical noted for its comic illustrations. Many of Germany’s leading draughtsmen contributed to the weekly’s pages, but there was also much unsigned hackwork, and this is what Oswald Sickert was hired to provide.79 It is not likely that the work was very remunerative, but it does seem to have convinced Anne Sheepshanks of the suitor’s earnestness and capability. The marriage was allowed to go forward.

Oswald Sickert travelled from Munich to claim his bride. During the years of trial his ardour had remained undimmed. As Eleanor confided happily to one of her friends, he loved her ‘with all the strength of a reserved nature concentrated to love one object’.80 The wedding took place in the parish church at Harrow on 3 August 1859. Eleanor was resplendent in a gown of white striped silk. She had no fewer than five bridesmaids, including her two young pupils. Mr Harris gave her away,81 and Mrs Slee came over from Dieppe for the occasion.82 Although there is no record of Anne Sheepshanks’ attendance at the ceremony, she certainly gave her blessing to it. She also gave Eleanor an allowance with which to start out on married life.83

The honeymoon took the newly-weds through Belgium to Düsseldorf, on to the picturesque lake at Königswasser, and thence to Munich. There the young couple installed themselves in a small flat at 16 Schwantalestrasse. Eleanor brought with her little more than her beautiful wedding dress, her ‘Paris trousseau’, and a desire to make a happy home.84 They had little furniture beyond a bed and a piano; but that was probably all that they needed.85 It was certainly convenient; leases tended to be short in Munich and the Sickerts moved flat three times over the next four years.86

The Munich in which they established themselves was a thriving if rather pretentious little town, with a population of some 130,000. Although medieval in origin, it was very much a modern city, exuding a sense of newness, freshness, and cleanliness. Many of the recently built houses had little front gardens, and many of the streets were lined with trees. Munich was self-consciously proud to be the capital of Bavaria, and the home of its royal house. The Wittelsbach monarchs – the recently abdicated Ludwig I and the reigning Maximilian II – had conceived the city as a centre of culture and style. They had laid out broad avenues and spacious parks. They had erected a succession of mock-classical and mock-Renaissance buildings to complement the few pre-existing Gothic and baroque churches. The Wittelsbachs had also established important collections of art – the classical sculptures of the Glyptotech, the old masters of the Kunstmuseum, and the new masters of the Neukunst Museum. Munich was full of ‘new masters’, or would-be new masters. The numerous major building projects, the prospects of royal patronage, and the high quality (as much as the low price) of the Bavarian beer, made Munich a focus for painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, and artists of every sort and every nationality.

There were, according to one resident writing at the beginning of the 1860s, ‘about a thousand artists in Munich’. They constituted a distinct and lively social group. They were noted for their conviviality, their ‘love of amusement and pageant’.87 They ‘congregated and made merry with cheap Künstlerfesten’, some more formal than others.88 Every few years they would arrange an elaborate ‘costume ball’, taking over the main rooms of the Odeum and transforming them with fantastical decorations, before transforming themselves with no less fantastical costumes. Each spring the artists would decamp en masse to the wooded hills south of the city to celebrate a May-fest with dining, dancing, and revelling. Nor was it just artists who were drawn to Munich. The low cost of living in Bavaria encouraged a sizeable contingent of foreigners, and particularly of English people, to settle in the city. Food was inexpensive; there were no rates; and servants were easy to come by. In 1860 a fixed sterling income went further in Munich than in almost any other capital in Europe.

The cosmopolitan and artistic ambience of the city ensured that Eleanor felt none of the isolation that removal to a new and foreign world might have otherwise entailed. She found two supportive groups ready to welcome her: the artists and the English. Oswald Sickert’s long connection with Munich had given him a place near the heart of the city’s artistic community. Despite his commitments to the Fliegende Blätter, he continued to produce his own work as well, and to exhibit it at the Munich Kunstverein.89 He had many artist friends (Füssli and Willich had returned to the city from Paris); and Eleanor, with her knowledge of German, was able to welcome them, first at Schwanthalestrasse and then at a new flat in Augustenstrasse. There were English artists, too, in Munich, and many of these were drawn into the Sickerts’ convivial circle, along with other less artistic compatriots. Although there was an English ‘Minister Plenipotentiary’ at the Bavarian court,90 the main focus for the expatriate community was provided by the Anglican chaplaincy. There was at that time no actual church, but the congregation gathered for services each Sunday either at one of the new hotels or in a room at the Odeum.91

It was there that the Sickerts had their first-born child christened, barely a year after their arrival at Munich.92 Anne Sheepshanks, though she does not appear to have come over for the ceremony, agreed to stand as godmother to the young Walter Richard. And she must have been glad that the memory of her beloved brother was preserved in the boy’s middle name. For Eleanor, the choice may have served in part as an expiation of the lingering guilt and remorse that she felt over her (imagined) part in hastening Richard’s end. It was also an acknowledgement (and perhaps a projection) of the link between the Sickerts and their wealthy relatives. Walter was brought up with a lively sense of his maternal grandfather’s importance: the ‘89,500 micrometer observations’ that he made in the cellars of Somerset House became part of the family folklore.93

The infant Walter Richard was an adored first child. His name was instantly familiarized to ‘Wat’. His birth precipitated a move to a first-floor flat at 25 Blumenstrasse. Perhaps there was more room at the new address. There certainly needed to be. Mr and Mrs Sickert – both only, and lonely, children – seem to have been determined to create the full and happy family life that they had never known. Barely eighteen months after Walter’s arrival a second child was born, christened Robert. And only a year after that, a third son. Following the tradition of choosing names that worked both in English and German, he was called Bernard or, more Teutonically, Bernhard.* So brisk was the succession of infants that Bernhard had to be suckled by a wet nurse.94

The advent of siblings did nothing to dilute the infant Walter’s power and position. He was very much the eldest child. As a toddler he was precocious, winning, and lovely to look at. Eleanor, in later years, ‘never wearied of telling about his beauty and his perfect behaviour as a baby’ – rather to the irritation and surprise of his younger siblings who knew him as a less docile (though still beautiful) child.95 He had, too, a natural gift for self-dramatization. Even at the age of three his sudden entrance into the family sitting room one evening was so arresting that his parents’ friend Füssli, who was visiting, insisted on painting him. The picture – a life-size representation of the very young Walter holding an apple while clad only in a short nightshift, his huge mop of flaxen curls surrounding a ‘rosy face and solemn blue eyes’ – was in due course presented to the family and prominently hung in the living room. Walter grew up under this quasi-heroic image of himself. In later years he would describe it as his ‘first appearance on any stage as Hamlet’. It was clear that, even at the age of three, he had a desire to play the title role.96

The picture must also have served as a reminder of his everchanging appearance. The following year he effected the first of what would be many dramatic transformations. Or rather it was effected for him. ‘Wat’s head looks like a broom,’ his mother wrote, ‘now that the long curls are off.’ The short crop was perhaps well suited to his physique and temperament. ‘He is an immense fellow,’ his mother declared proudly, ‘taller and broader than the generality of boys at his age’, though she did admit that he had still ‘such a baby face’. This cherubic face, it was noted, masked a fearsome will: ‘He is very perverse and wayward, and wants a very tight hand.’ Too much ‘tenderness’ enabled him ‘to give way to his temper’.97 The tight hand, however, was one that only Eleanor could employ. Later in the same year she was remarking, Walter is not very easy to leave with the servants, I can make him mind without much trouble. With them He is master.’98 There was, however, no doubting his intelligence. He delighted in books, and with only the minimum of parental encouragement taught himself to read and write before he was four.99

In 1864, King Maximilian died and was succeeded by his son, the Wagner-loving eccentric Ludwig II – someone more ‘perverse and wayward’ than even the 4-year-old Walter Sickert. At almost the same moment, Mrs Sickert gave birth to a fourth child, a girl, christened Helena but known (like her mother) as Nellie. The ever-expanding young family moved once again, to a flat on the first floor at No. 4 Kleestrasse.100 This new address became the Sickerts’ most longstanding Munich home. It was set in a short cross-street running between the Bayerstrasse and the Schwanthalestrasse, close to the large park-cum-showground, the Theresienwiese, where the city’s annual Oktoberfest was held. Comforts were rather sparse. If there were no rates to pay on the flat, it was because no services were provided. There was no piped gas, no running water, and, of course, no water closet. There was, however, a maid to help with fetching and carrying, with getting wood for the fires, and water for the basins.

Life in the new flat was crowded, even cramped, but happy. Although there were regular excursions to the shops, to the Botanical Gardens (to feed the fish) and to the Theresienwiese (to roll on the grass), the whole family spent much of each day indoors. There was no nurse and no nursery. Eleanor sat, looking over the four young children in the living room, sewing and mending, while Oswald worked in a small adjoining studio room.101 Mrs Sickert was blessed with the rare ‘health and energy and courage’ necessary to bring up a large family on a small income. Food, she made sure, was always plentiful and nourishing, if simple – very simple. Jam was a rare event; sweets a once-a-year Christmas treat. Even birthdays were marked only with ‘plain cake’. The Sickerts adopted the Bavarian custom of having their main meal at midday. A rather frugal ‘tea’ of bread, butter, and milk, eaten at six, represented the children’s evening meal. The parents had a later but scarcely less frugal supper.102 Bread, rice, potatoes, oats and sago were the abundant staples of the Sickert table. They were often combined with the notoriously thin Bavarian milk into what the family called ‘pluffy puddings’.* It was a regimen of unexampled blandness which goes some way to explaining Walter’s later relish for the good things of French, Italian, and even British cuisine. Nevertheless, throughout his life, at times of crisis he would seek solace in the comforting familiarity of rice pudding or bread-and-milk.

Mrs Sickert was what her daughter called ‘an admirable baby mother’, with a real love of young children and a real gift for keeping them occupied, amused, and in order.103 Under her direction, Walter and his siblings devised their own entertainments. There was little money for toys, and it was thought better that they should make their own. Their mother’s workbasket was the principal source of materials, as they constructed miniature box carts with cotton-reel wheels, or transformed wooden button moulds into spinning tops. Their father’s old cigar boxes became ‘blocks of flats’, fitted out with acorn furniture. There was, however, a constant danger that the play – invariably led by Walter – would grow wild. Oswald Sickert was not a natural ‘baby father’. He had a ‘highly nervous’ temperament and found the stress of weekly deadlines and daily distractions hard to endure. Sometimes he would startle the children by bursting into the living room, interrupting their games with a despairing plea, ‘Can’t you keep these children quieter?’ He would, as Helena recalled, immediately regret the outburst; his wife ‘had only to turn reproachful eyes on him to bring his arms round her and a tender plea for forgiveness. Then he would steal away and we would look guiltily at each other and behave like mice.’104 But even without such irruptions, the children’s spells of furious practical activity alternated with ‘periods of silent contemplation’. Walter might take up a book. He was a voracious reader throughout his childhood.105 And Mrs Sickert would sometimes lay the flat tin top of the travelling bath on the floor and say it was a raft, on which the children would clamber aboard and ‘drift away on dim voyages’ of the mind.106