Walter Sickert: A Life

It was a cultured home. Music played a large part in family life. Mrs Sickert sang constantly at her work as she watched over her brood. Most evenings she and Oswald would make music together, Oswald accompanying her as she sang, and then playing on for ‘an hour or so’ on his own. Beethoven and Schumann were favourites.107 In the Munich of Ludwig II it was impossible to escape entirely from the music of Wagner. His operas were performed frequently at the Hoftheater, breaking up the more conventional repertoire of Meyerbeer, Mozart, Halévy, Weber, and Rossini.108 Mr and Mrs Sickert went. Eleanor felt that perhaps one Wagner opera was enough.109 Oswald, however, was more intrigued. When the ‘Ring Cycle’ was published and a friend brought round the full orchestral score of the four operas, Oswald, in a bravura display of sight-reading, played it straight through, adapting the music to the piano as he went along, the friend scurrying ahead, turning the pages as fast as he could.110

Although the infant Walter listened with interest to the talk about Wagner and the ‘mad king’, and enjoyed the constant flow of music and song that ran through 4 Kleestrasse, there remained a certain distance to his appreciation. Unlike his younger siblings – particularly Bernhard – he had ‘no musical gift at all’ and was not able even to ‘sing true’.111 He showed a more ready aptitude for the household’s other main preoccupation: art. The evidences of Oswald Sickert’s profession were all around the flat. And although his studio room may have been sacrosanct, his paintings were on view, as were works by his father and by his friends. His artist confrères were constant visitors. Füssli, besides painting the 3-year-old Walter, executed a ‘charming’ Ingres-like portrait of Mrs Sickert in her black moiré-antique dress with white lace collar, her hair framing her face in ‘smooth shining rolls’.112 Surrounded by such examples it was not surprising that the ‘chief pleasure’ of Walter – and of his brothers – was ‘painting, drawing and modelling in wax’.113 More time was spent in artistic endeavour than in anything else. Almost none of Walter’s puerile production has survived. There is, however, nothing to suggest he was a prodigy. Nevertheless, even at five it seems that, unlike the vast majority of children, he was more concerned to record what he saw, rather than to escape into the realms of the imagination. Mrs Sickert sent one friend a ‘rather crude drawing’ by the 5-year-old Walter of Helena as a babe in arms.114

Mrs Sickert was ‘at home’ at Kleestrasse on Thursday afternoons, and often received visitors.115 The growth of the family enhanced rather than diminished the Sickerts’ thriving social life. There were several other families with young children who gravitated towards them. Eleanor was befriended by the Edward Wilberforces, a young couple who had one son the same age as Robert and another christened only three weeks after Helena. Edward Wilberforce had left the Navy after getting married (to an American with the arresting name of Fannie Flash) and was preparing for a career at the Bar. He had devoted his time in Munich to writing an entertaining and opinionated book on the life of the town.116 Although there was no ‘English Doctor’ in Munich, Dr Heinrich von Ranke (grand-nephew of the great historian), who had a practice in Carlstrasse, was a keen Anglophile who spoke excellent English.117 A specialist in treating children, he became the Sickerts’ family doctor and a good friend. Dr Ranke was mildly eccentric, full of ‘German fun’ and fond of practical jokes; his tiny wife was – like Oswald Sickert – a ‘Schleswig-Dane’ and – like Eleanor – the daughter of an English astronomer.118 They too had a bevy of young children, playmates for the infant Sickerts.119

Shortly after the Sickerts’ move to Kleestrasse, Johann Jürgen Sickert came down from Altona to visit the family in their new home and to see his grandchildren. He was only sixty-one and it was a surprise when, not long after his return home, he died. He was found early one morning at his studio, dead in his chair, in front of his easel.120 Oswald Sickert had to go and sort out his affairs. He discovered his native town in a curious and unhappy condition. In the summer of 1864 the Prussians, together with the Austrians, had engineered another quarrel with Denmark. It had led to a very brief military confrontation in which the Prusso-Austrian alliance had comprehensively defeated the Danes. The spoils of their victory were the longdisputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Altona and its citizens had ceased to be subject to the Danish crown. Oswald Sickert – like his father (and his son) – was neither political nor nationalist. Art and music were his concerns. During his long residence in Munich he had come to regard himself as a Bavarian-German of liberal tendencies.121 But the unrest of war and the clear signs of Prussia’s military ambitions in Europe were unsettling. Back in Munich, Eleanor announced that she was ‘growing fidgety’.122

It was also an unsettling time for the young Walter. Eleanor was becoming increasingly alarmed at his health: ‘Wat looks very pale and thin,’ she reported, ‘but he eats and drinks and sleeps & walks any distance.’ He could still manage a trip to the Botanical Gardens to feed the ducks, but found it hard to concentrate for long. Even the prospect of earning a coin for learning to spell some new words was not enough to sustain his interest. He soon grew tired.123 Munich was known to have a less than healthy climate. Infant deaths were common. (Eleanor was later told by Dr Ranke that she was the only mother on his books to have ‘borne four children and brought them alive out of infancy in the city’.) The ‘high bitter air’ was liable to cause bronchial problems, and indeed all the Sickert children suffered regularly from croup. Walter’s complaint, however, was of a different order. The reason for his pallor and lassitude was discovered to be some sort of intestinal blockage or abscess. This seems to have developed into an anal fistula as the body, seeking a new outlet, opened up a narrow channel between the lower part of the rectum and the skin around the anus. An operation became necessary to close up the wound, and restore the natural channel. It was a problematic business. The fistula was kept from healing by the constant entrance into it of material from the bowel. The first attempt by the Munich doctors was unsuccessful. And so was the second. By the middle of 1865, Walter was still suffering.124

That summer, Eleanor took the family to Dieppe. It was a punishing journey to make with four small children, in a train without lavatory compartments or buffet car.125 But the town held such a special place in her affections that she wanted to introduce her offspring to its charms – to the old streets, the castle on its cliff, the Gothic churches of St Jacques and St Remy, to the quaint onion-domed Casino, the long pebbly beach, the bracing northern sea, to the school house on the slopes of Neuville that had been her youthful home; and – of course – to Mrs Slee and her daughters. It was Walter’s first experience to a town that would become at different times his home, his refuge, and his inspiration.

It was also his first introduction to his godmother. Anne Sheepshanks came over from England, full of kind thoughts and offers of practical help. Her first scheme of assistance was to increase and formalize the allowance that she made to Eleanor and establish it under a trust.* Her second concern was Walter’s health. After the failure of the two Munich operations, she believed that nothing short of a London specialist would suffice. The acknowledged centre for rectal surgery was St Mark’s Hospital, in London’s City Road, and it was arranged that Oswald Sickert would bring Walter over to London in October. As Miss Sheepshanks no longer had a house in town, she rented one – at Duncan Terrace, Islington – close to the hospital.126

The expedition, following directly upon the holiday at Dieppe, gave Walter a foretaste of another of his future motifs. It was, however, the drama of the operation, and his central part in that drama, rather than Islington’s well-proportioned Georgian terraces, that seems to have impressed him most. It became another of the key points in his personal mythology. ‘Islington,’ he liked to claim in later years, ‘has always been kind to me. My life was saved at the age of five … [at] St Mark’s Hospital in the City Road.’ He was proud of the fact that the operation was carried out by Alfred Cooper – then the hospital’s Assistant Surgeon, but later a VD specialist and then a knight (and finally the father-in-law of Lady Diana Cooper).127 After the operation Walter and his father stayed on at Duncan Terrace for three weeks.128 It was an experience that sharpened Walter’s keen sense of his own separateness, and specialness, within the family. By November, however, they were back at Kleestrasse ready for all the excitements of a Bavarian winter.

It was the season when Munich came into its own. One of Sickert’s abiding childhood memories was of the city in its Christmas finery: dusted with powdery snow; Christmas trees standing on the street corners; and the darkness of the cobbled Dultplatz aglitter with gaily illumined street stalls dispensing such seasonal delicacies as gilt gingerbread and sugar effigies of the Baby Jesus – delicacies which, for once, he was allowed to enjoy. As an adult he sometimes wished that he might be five years old again so that he could experience the thrill of it all afresh.129 The informal drama of the Christmas streets found an echo in more conventional performances too. Another cherished recollection was of a visit to the circus, when a troop of elephants had been ridden round the ring by marmosets in fancy Zouave costumes.130 It was a first memorable taste of the popular theatre.

But, aside from these festive moments, Munich seems to have left remarkably little impress upon Sickert’s infant mind. In later life he spoke of it rarely, and never with enthusiasm. Although he was so responsive to the poetry of other places, Munich’s broad avenues and mongrel buildings did not excite him. Its treasures remained unknown: the fashion for taking very young children around art galleries had not begun. He could not escape Otto Klenze’s colossal statue of ‘Bavaria’ – represented as a sixty-foot-high bronze female holding a wreath above her head – which dominated the Theresienwiese, but it failed to impress him. Commissioned by Ludwig I, it was – Sickert claimed in later years – one of the things that first convinced him of the folly of state sponsorship of the arts.131

He preferred the countryside around the town, and came to know it well. From the moment that the May-fest signalled the beginning of the summer, Munichers would flock to leave the city. The Sickerts joined this annual exodus, passing a month or two in the Bavarian countryside, lodging with peasants’ families, or staying at country inns. They would visit the little villages dotting the shore of the nearby Starnbergersee – the magnificent lake some sixteen miles long just south of Munich. Or they might venture further afield to other lakes in the Bavarian Tyrol – to the wooded shores of the Chiemsee or to the Staffelsee. In an alfresco variation of their Munich life, Oswald would sketch and paint, while Eleanor would look after the children. In the evening they would all gather in the biergarten of the inn.132

There were also happy outdoor days spent with the family of the Revd Rodney Fowler, the sometime rector of Broadway in Worcestershire, who became the English chaplain at Munich in 1866. He and his wife, arriving with two daughters, aged five and two, had been at once drawn into the Sickerts’ circle.133 The Sickerts also paid visits to Laufzorn, the Rankes’ country house. The place, a former hunting lodge of the kings of Bavaria, was supposedly haunted, which may have added to the excitement of the visits.134 But the main pleasure for the children was in playing in the huge echoing banqueting room, which contained an improvised swing – a long plank on which several children could sit astride while it was swung, fearfully, lengthways. As Helena recalled, ‘Every child had to cling tightly to the one in front and the exercise was performed to a chorus of “Hutsche-Kutscher-Genung!” the last word being shouted as loud and as long as possible.’ There was also a big hay barn where the children could jump from the rafters into the hay below.135

Walter delighted in such games and in such company. He was extremely sociable and made friends easily.136 Surrounded by boys at home, he seems to have enjoyed being surrounded by girls elsewhere. At the age of six he had managed to become engaged both to one of Dr Ranke’s daughters and to the eldest of Mr Fowler’s girls. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he remarked, when looking back on the arrangement, ‘that there was any inconsistency.’ It was an attitude of mind that he preserved in his relations with the female sex throughout his life.137

The Bavarian summers were months of almost idyllic pleasure for the children. It was in the Starnbergersee that Walter discovered the delights of swimming, and there, too, that he learnt to fish.138 Initially, he had merely tied a piece of bread to a length of string and watched the fishes nibble, but Mr Fowler, steeped in the sporting traditions of the Anglican clergy, showed him – much to Eleanor’s dismay – how to bait a hook. Death, however, seems to have intrigued Walter. One holiday game involved the construction of a miniature cemetery from pebbles and moss and twigs.139 In Walter’s memory these summers took on the hues of a golden age. He would look back to them as a time of peace, calm, and certainty. ‘When I used to play by mill streams in Bavaria [and] listened to my mother sing the Schoener Muller of Schubert,’ he recalled, ‘I thought it would always be like that.’

The extraordinary beauty of the Bavarian countryside in early summer – the greenness of the foliage, the clearness of the light, the profusion of flowers – made a profound and lasting impression on all the Sickert children. Walter, though he became the great artist of urban life and urban architecture, retained always a flickering sense that ‘woods & lakes & brooks’ were ‘the nicest things in the world’.140 It was the quality of light that made them special: the fall of broken sunshine through the overarching canopy of leaves. ‘I think,’ he declared, ‘the loveliest thing in Nature is a sous-bois.’141 Even as a child he sought to express his admiration in art. From the age of five he wanted to paint such verdant, sun-dappled scenes. It became one of the recurrent desires of his working life – recurrent, in part, because it was never achieved.142

In all the Sickert children’s games and activities Walter took the lead. Although Mrs Sickert maintained a clear structure of kindly authority, she rarely attempted any interference between her offspring, and would not countenance ‘tale bearing’. It was her principle that they should all learn to live together.143 This was a situation that rather suited Walter, who was ‘not only the eldest, but by far the cleverest’, and the most energetic of the siblings.144 Robert was a fretful child, Bernhard a fractious one, and Helena too young to exert her own considerable powers.145 From the outset, Walter imposed his will upon them all, getting his own way either by force of character or by guile – though he was not above climbing out of his cot in the nursery to pull his sister’s hair if he felt the occasion warranted.146 But, as Helena admitted, even at this young age ‘he was able to infuse so much charm into life’, and to make ‘our pursuits so interesting’, that ‘we were generally his willing slaves’.147 It became one of Mrs Sickert’s recurrent complaints that none of the siblings was able to ‘resist’ Walter, an indication – as Helena noted – that not all his activities were agreeable to authority. Walter, however, was a fickle leader, with no sense of responsibility to his followers. His restless intelligence needed the stimulation of constant change. For his siblings, the ‘tragedy’ came – and came frequently – when ‘the magician suddenly took flight to some other adventure and the one which had seemed so entrancing, while [Walter] led it, turned to folly in the grey morning after’.148

From a very young age Walter was regarded as being separate from and above his younger brothers. The phrase ‘Walter and the boys’ was a common and early family coinage.149 He enjoyed a privileged position as the eldest child. In the evenings he alone was allowed to sit up with his parents, not to supper, but at the supper table.150 Oswald Sickert’s long working hours and occasional absences encouraged Walter to develop a sense almost of responsibility towards his mother. In later years he would describe how, during his Munich childhood, he was ‘for many years’ her ‘only rational companion’.151 He alone amongst his siblings established a bond with his father. The other children were slightly frightened of ‘Papa’. It seemed that he never spoke to them unless it was to give an order or to make some disparaging comment.152 But then he did not speak very much to anyone. He was extremely taciturn and reserved by nature.153 Walter, however, he did talk to – after his own fashion. The trip to London had fostered relations between them. Walter always held dear the memory of his father’s kindly face looking down at him as he sank under the anaesthetic before the operation – a perhaps rare intimation of tenderness from his diffident parent.154 It was with Walter that Oswald Sickert took his daily walk on the Theresienwiese.155 And he impressed his son with his few words. He had, as Walter recorded, ‘a wide critical comprehension’. And though he was apt to judge himself as ‘coldly as he did everything else’, there seems to have been an edge of wit to his verdicts.156 Many years later, when reading Heine, Sickert was struck by the similarities between the poet’s self-deflating irony and his father’s own ‘expressions & attitude of spirit’. They came, he noted, from the same northern, Baltic world.157

Even as a child, Walter was interested in his father’s work – his paintings and, more particularly, his drawings. The arrival at 4 Kleestrasse of the Fliegende Blätter on Thursday evenings at supper time was ‘an event’ in Walter’s week, and not merely because he was presented with the paper wrapper to wear as a cap. He was interested to hear his father’s comments on the reproduction of the wood engravings. And he liked to look at the pictures. Many of the images lived with him throughout his life.* And although it was perhaps the comedy of the situations depicted that provided the initial attraction, he also imbibed an understanding of technique and an appreciation of how scenes of everyday life could be rendered in art. The quality of work in the paper was extremely high and the variety instructive. When he came to review the artistic masters of his Munich childhood Sickert singled out the work of Wilhelm Diez, Wilhelm Busch, and particularly Adolf Oberlander, whom he praised for his ‘frankness’ and his genius for rendering scenes ‘in terms of limpid light, and shade’.158 The set of bound copies of the Fliegende Blätter became part of the Sickert family library and Walter had plenty of opportunities to refresh his memory and refine his knowledge of its artists, but the foundation of his appreciation and understanding was laid in his early childhood.159

During the summer of 1866 the anxieties that Oswald and Eleanor had felt about the political situation in Europe were confirmed. The Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, having carefully prepared the ground, engineered a dispute with Austria as a pretext for laying claim to Holstein. In what became known as the Seven Weeks War, the Prussians decisively defeated their former allies and their associates (nine German states, including Bavaria, had sided with the Austrians). In August, a peace treaty was signed at Prague giving Prussia full control of both Schleswig and Holstein. A new German constitution was established, and it was decreed that all citizens of Schleswig-Holstein would become naturalized Prussians in October of the following year. Oswald Sickert was concerned at the effect this might have on his young family. He did not wish his sons to be liable at some future date to conscription into the Prussian army (and he was anxious, too, that they should not become what he called ‘Beer-swilling Bavarians’).160 The idea of moving to England took serious hold. It was, however, an operation that required some planning.

Walter, in the meantime, began attending a local school, and his brothers soon followed him. It was a huge, impersonal place. Each class had between fifty and eighty boys, and pupils were drawn from all backgrounds. Robert found the noise and the number of boys altogether too much, but Walter remained unfazed. He got on ‘very nicely’, his mother reported: ‘He does not learn much, they do nothing but German & reckoning and these public schools are so large that the bright ones always have to keep pace with the slow ones.’161 Walter, in his mother’s informed – if not unbiased – opinion, was very definitely one of ‘the bright ones’.

By November 1867 the Sickerts’ plans for moving to England were well advanced. Anne Sheepshanks had given her blessing to the scheme. The Sickerts left Munich the following spring. Walter does not appear to have considered it a deracination. Although in the anti-German decades of the twentieth century he always enjoyed the shock that could be produced by announcing to an English audience that he was a ‘Münchener Kind’l’, he never thought of himself as a German or a Bavarian.162 He retained a passing enjoyment of German literature and relish for the tricks of the German language.163 But these were surface pleasures; they left very little mark on his character. Duncan Grant, who came to know Sickert well, considered that there was ‘very little of the German’ in his make-up.164 Sickert himself admitted only to having ‘a certain German quality, which is called in German sächlich – devoted to things, ideas, etc. – to the possible disadvantage of people’, a quality by which he excused his often disparaging critical comments upon the work of his friends.165 But while he certainly did possess this cool, critical, northern trait, he was more likely to have inherited it from his father than to have imbibed it amidst the hurly-burly of the Munich Volksschule.

The Sickerts, on leaving Munich, did not go at once to England. They passed a long summer at Dieppe. It was a happy interlude. Walter was even enrolled briefly at the Collège du Dieppe.166 He exchanged German for French. If he did not have an ear for music he had one for languages. Learning by mimicry rather than book study, his accent ran ahead of his understanding. He would pick up whole passages of French speech and recite them perfectly, convincing Frenchmen that he was a young compatriot. The disadvantage of this trick only came when they answered him and he was unable either to understand or to reply.167 The experience of being lost for words was a new one to him.

* It became the nucleus of the V&A picture collection.

* The whole area has since been remodelled: the west side of the square has been replaced by the Brunswick Centre, a 1960s shopping and housing development.

* ‘A sun that shines in the morning,/A child that drinks wine,/A woman who knows Latin/Never come to a good end.’

* Sickert preserved a daguerreotype of his grandfather, sitting very still in a dressing-gown and a smoking-cap ‘calculated to turn his pious grandson green with envy’. ‘From the Life’, Morning Post (18 May 1925).

* Though he may not have known it, he too had been born out of wedlock. His parents married in June 1828, four months after his birth.

* On the baptismal register, Bernard’s name is spelled ‘Bernhart’, though he never seems to have used this form. Robert was given the second name ‘Oswald’, like his father.

* ‘Milk and butter are in a state of barbarism,’ reported the travel writer Edward Wilberforce. The butter was often rancid. As to the difference between milk and cream in Munich, ‘a long experience has shown me that cream is milk with water put in it, while milk is water with milk put in it’.

* The trust was set up on 29 June, between Mr and Mrs Sickert, Anne Sheepshanks, and three trustees, Augustus de Morgan, William Sharp, and George Campbell de Morgan (a copy is in the Sutton papers at GUL).