Walter Sickert: A Life

Walter also sought out drama in more conventional settings. He became stage-struck, or Bard-struck. At school they would read Shakespeare with Mr Hunt in the gardens of Pembridge Square. Walter soon purchased his own Globe edition of the works. He was taken by his parents to see Samuel Phelps, the great Shakespearean actor of the day, playing Shylock, Falstaff, Wolsey, Macbeth (and Sir Peter Teazle), and – enraptured by his performances – soon learnt to imitate his manner.53

But always alongside these other enthusiasms ran his constant interest in art. Throughout his schooldays, his sister recalled, ‘his most abiding pleasure was drawing & painting’. The ‘very little pocket money’ he received from his father was put towards buying art materials.54 He also looked at pictures. He pored over the popular illustrated weeklies, drinking in the dramatic reportage of the Illustrated London News, the humorous diversions of Punch, and the educational diet of the Penny Magazine.55 He began to be taken to public galleries, and he was excited by what he saw. ‘It is natural to all ages,’ he later remarked, ‘to like the narrative picture, and I fancy, if we spoke the truth, and our memories are clear enough, that we liked at first the narrative picture in the proportion that it can be said to be lurid.’ The young Walter’s ‘uninfluenced interest’ was first captured at the South Kensington Museum by John ‘Mad’ Martin’s swirling, almost cinematic vision of Belshazzar’s Feast and by George Cruikshank’s melodramatic series of prints, The Bottle, depicting the awful and inevitable effects of drink upon a Victorian family.56 From the early 1870s onwards, Walter also went with his father to the regular winter loanexhibitions held in the Royal Academy’s gallery at Burlington House.57 There he was introduced to the works of the old masters. He ‘loved’ them from the first, perhaps not least because they, too, were often ‘narrative pictures’ and sometimes ‘lurid’.58

Almost unconsciously Walter absorbed many of the practical and professional concerns of picture making. At home and elsewhere they were constant elements in the life around him. He spent time too in the studios of his father’s friends. He even posed for a history painting, appearing as a young – and rather gawky – Nelson, in George William Joy’s picture, Thirty Years Before Trafalgar.59

In 1873 Mrs Sickert gave birth to her sixth and last child, another boy. He was christened Leonard but was known in the family as Leo.60 Walter, however, was far removed from the world of the nursery. He was growing up. In the summer of 1874 the family went to the North Devon village of Mortehoe, renting a cottage from the local publican, Mr Conibear. It was a halcyon summer for Walter. The place was a ‘real favourite’. Several family friends joined them there. Walter helped on the farm, learning to cut and bind wheat, and how to drive a wagon through a gate. He made friends with the Conibear children. One day he discovered an octopus washed up on the seashore and, putting it on to a slate, took it up the hill to show to Professor T. H. Huxley, who was also staying in the village for the summer. The eminent scientist took at once to the inquisitive 14-year-old, and they became friends.61

An interest in cephalopods was not Walter’s only claim to precocity. He would rise early to help the milkmaids with their work – or, rather, to distract them. Years later, when writing to Nina Hamnett, he told her, ‘If you go to Barnstaple have look at Mortehoe, which I think adorable, probably because I used to make love to the milkmaids there when I was 14.’62 Although his love-making may have been no more than flirtation, it is possible that it went further.* The suggestion is easy enough to credit. Walter’s excitement at the holiday is palpable. As early as the following March he was writing to Mr Conibear informing him that his parents would definitely be taking the house again the following summer, and enclosing two sketches – one of Mortehoe parish church, the other of a rocking horse recently given to Oswald Valentine.63

The North Devon headland had charms not only for Walter. His father was inspired by the rugged coastal landscape. One of his paintings, worked up from sketches made that summer, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. It was Oswald Sickert’s first exposure at Burlington House, and built upon his showings at the New Water Colour Society, the Dudley Gallery, and Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ in Pall Mall.64 The achievement gave Walter a first, vicarious, savour of the Academy’s extraordinary power as the arbiter of contemporary taste and artistic prestige. It was a pungent taste and one that both attracted and repelled him.

* ‘Sky blue’ was a slang term for bread-and-milk.

* An echo of his happy time with the milkmaids at Mortehoe perhaps lingers in his 1910 rhapsody upon the glorious physical presence of Juno, in Raphael’s The Council of the Gods at the Villa Farnesiana, Rome, with her ‘fleshy lustrous face, like one of Rowlandson’s wenches’; her hands, he remarks approvingly, ‘are gross, material hands, the hands, let us say, of a milkmaid’ (‘Idealism’, New Age, 12 May 1910). Sickert’s friend at Mortehoe, the farmer’s son, David Smith, certainly did get into trouble for getting one of the local farm girls pregnant (information from Mr Conibear’s great-grandson, George Gammon).

III L’ENFANT TERRIBLE

I think I could recommend you a boy.

(G. F. Maclear to Reginald Poole)

Within the family, Walter’s spirit and his domination of his younger brothers were beginning to cause some anxiety. It was decided that he needed a more challenging environment than could be provided by the little school in Pembridge Villas and that he needed to be separated from his brothers, or, rather, they needed to be separated from him. (Helena, whose health was causing some concern, had already been sent away to school at Miss Slee’s now somewhat reduced establishment in Dieppe.1) After the matter had been inquired into with obvious thoroughness, the boys were divided up between three of London’s leading public schools. Robert went to UCS, and Bernhard to the City of London School (where it was hoped that the formidable Headmaster, Dr Abbot, would ‘cure him of laziness’). Walter was enrolled at King’s College School. He arrived – aged fifteen – for the autumn term of 1875.2

The school was then housed in the basement of the east enfilade of Somerset House, next to King’s College itself. It was essentially a day school, though a few of the 550 pupils ‘boarded’ at the houses of the married masters. The main entrance was on the Strand, where, opposite the gates of St Mary-le-Strand, a broad flight of steps ran down to an inaptly named concrete ‘playground’ in which no games were ever played. Although the school dining room looked out over the river, and at least some of the classrooms were large high-ceilinged spaces level with the street, the principal flavour was one of subterranean gloom and confinement. The place was sometimes referred to, with as much truth as humour, as ‘the dungeon on the Strand’3. The first – and defining – feature of the school was a long, narrow, and dimly lit vaulted corridor off which most of the classrooms led. Dark, even during summer, it was lit by a line of gas lamps that lent their own particular aroma to the inevitable institutional scents of floor polish, cabbage, and unwashed boy. From 11.15 to 11.30 a.m. and from 1 to 1.30 p.m., and at the end of the day’s work, the corridor was generally ‘a pandemonium of yelling, shouting and singing’. Some of the bigger and ‘lustier fellows’ of the Lower School would sometimes amuse themselves by linking arms and rushing down the passage, ‘to the extreme discomfort of those who failed to get out of their way in time’.4 For Walter, however, the site was fraught with positive familial associations. It was in the basements of Somerset House that Richard Sheepshanks had carried out his comparative measurements to establish the new official yard.

At King’s College School in the 1870s the syllabus was rigorously limited. In the ‘Classical Division’ to which Sickert belonged the concentration was on Latin and Greek. The study of these was supplemented by courses in mathematics, English literature, French, and divinity. German and drawing were offered as optional extras, and a ‘course of lectures on some branch of experimental science’ was provided as an afterthought.* It was a system that Sickert came to appreciate. Many years later, when visiting St Felix School, Southwold in the late 1920s to give a lecture on art, he was amazed at the number of subjects being taught. There were at least nine different ones included in the weekly timetable. ‘Tiens!’ he exclaimed. ‘Three subjects are enough. Latin, English and Mathematics. Then the pupils may leave school knowing a little about something which would give them confidence which is so necessary for their future studies, instead of nothing about anything at all.’5

The school, presided over by the long-serving Revd G. F. Maclear, had established an excellent academic reputation. There were many good and several excellent teachers. Sickert’s form master was the genial Dr Robert Belcher. Walter soon began to flourish under his tutelage. He already had some grasp of both Latin and Greek, but this deepened under the regime of close reading, ‘prose writing’, and Greek verse composition. Walter developed a real familiarity with – and enduring love for – the language and literature of classical antiquity. Without laying claim to being a scholar, he continued to read – and to misquote – the classical authors with relish throughout his life. His particular favourite was the clear-sighted, unsentimental epigrammist Martial.6

Sickert, so he claimed, was also ‘naturally and from heredity interested in mathematics’. He would work out geometry propositions on his daily walk to school.7 But it was in the modern languages that he really excelled. His polyglot upbringing (and the fact that most of his contemporaries ‘took neither French or German classes very seriously’8) gave him ample opportunity to shine. He won the Upper School French Prize in Michaelmas 1876, and the Upper School German Prize the following term. And at the annual prize-giving, at Christmas 1877, he carried off the Vice-Master’s German Prize.9

Art was not one of the strengths of King’s College School. Although the great watercolourist John Sell Cotman had taught drawing at the school in the 1830s, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had briefly been a pupil, they had left no enduring legacy. Art was not part of the curriculum and could only be taken as an extra option at the extra cost of a guinea a term.10 There is no evidence to suggest that Walter ever studied it. Not that he needed the structure of formal classes to stimulate his interest. He drew incessantly, and achieved some recognition for his work amongst his schoolfellows. On one memorable occasion when he was caught drawing caricatures in class, the form master, instead of punishing him, framed the confiscated picture.11

Class work, it seems, only ever absorbed so much of Walter’s attention. He was undaunted by the wider stage of his new school, and soon surrounded himself with new friends, among them the school’s leading scholar, Alfred Pollard, and Alfred Kalisch (who became the music critic for the Daily News).12 Sickert’s energy and liveliness were captivating, and so were his emerging good looks. One former classmate recalled that even as a schoolboy he had the glamour that attaches to the ‘extremely handsome’.13 He delighted in doing the unexpected. One of the Japanese boys from Mr Hunt’s school had also moved to KCS and Walter greatly surprised and impressed his new schoolmates by addressing him in Japanese.14

Amongst his other pranks was a scheme to undercut the school tuck shop by setting up his own doughnut stall at break time. KCS pupils had long been complaining at the quality of the fare provided by Mr Reynolds – the local baker who ran the tuck shop – and at ‘the enormous profits’ that he made from his monopoly. Like many of Sickert’s later commercial ventures, the doughnut stall was not a financial success and was closed down by the authorities. He sometimes claimed that the scam led to his expulsion from the school, but this was an exaggeration.15 The headmaster was, on the whole, indulgent of Walter’s irregularities.16 He was mindful perhaps of his contributions to other areas of school life.

Dr Maclear took a particular interest in the end-of-year performances put on as part of the Christmas prize-giving. A mixed programme was presented with scenes not only from Shakespeare and the other English classics but also from Greek, Latin, French, and German dramas – all done in their original languages. Sickert excelled in these. He earned an early fame for his performance in the late-medieval farce L’Avocat Pathelin, in which his French was considered to be ‘perfect’.17

Although divinity was a compulsory subject, and each day began with a fifteen-minute service in chapel, the atmosphere of the school was not markedly religious. Walter got confirmed while he was there, but he treated the whole matter with ‘genial cynicism’ and, having been rewarded with the gift of a watch, promptly gave up going to church on Sundays with his mother and siblings.18 It was just one of the ways in which he started to emancipate himself from family life. While Robert and Bernhard retreated home from their respective schools, becoming more dreamy and inward looking, Walter took off in new directions. He made his own friends and ‘lived a life of his own’.19

He began to explore London. It teemed outside the school gates. Alfred Pollard recalled that to attend KCS was to have it ‘daily borne in on one … that one [was] a citizen of a great city’.20 A constant tide of human – and animal – traffic passed before the school and through the triple portal of Temple Bar, Wren’s baroque gateway linking the City and the West End – the allied worlds of Business and Pleasure. King’s College School stood, albeit with a certain aloofness, in the world of Pleasure. Despite the nearby presence of the Law Courts, the surrounding area had a hazardous reputation. It was thick with public houses and theatres. The Strand was the most notorious thoroughfare in Central London: no respectable woman would walk down it unaccompanied for fear of being mistaken for a prostitute. North of the school lay Covent Garden, and the disreputable courts and alleys around Holywell Street – centre of the second-hand-book and pornography trades.

For the King’s College School students the pleasures afforded by the area tended to be rather more innocent. As one former pupil remembered, after school (3 p.m. on most days, but 1 p.m. on Wednesdays, and noon on Saturdays) many boys headed off to eat ices at Gatti’s in the Adelaide Gallery, or went to Sainsbury’s, ‘a chemist close to the school who sold splendid iced soda drinks from a fountain’.21 Sickert, however, was more adventurous and inquisitive. He was, in the words of one schoolfellow, ‘the cat that walked by itself’. ‘He didn’t care to do our things, he was aloof … but he could be wonderfully good company when he was in the mood. Everyone liked to be asked to walk home with him from school. He never invited more than two of us at a time. He knew North London like the back of his hand, he could tell us endless stories about the little streets and byways as we went along and pointed out pictures that we hadn’t seen.’22

His journey home would often be broken by a prolonged loiter in Wellington Street, before the office windows of Entr’acte magazine – a review of the contemporary theatrical and music-hall scene. There he could avidly scrutinize the most recent works of the paper’s star artist, Alfred Bryan, that were pinned up for display.23

Although he admired Bryan’s dashing if rather facile work, and that of several other black-and-white men, his great enthusiasm was for the drawing of Charles Keene. Since 1850, Keene had been one of the leading draughtsmen on Punch. His assured but loosely executed cartoons captured the vital flavours of Victorian popular life with unrivalled brio. Better than any of his contemporaries, it was said, he could ‘emphasise the absurdity of a City man’s hat’, suggest the ‘twist of a drunkard’s coat’ or ‘an old lady’s bombazeen about to pop’. And he did it with a delicacy that often left the viewer in some doubt as to whether it was caricature at all. Keene became Sickert’s first artistic hero.

It was an admiration that he shared with a select band of discerning spirits. Amongst his schoolfriends was a young boarder, a Scot called Joseph Crawhall, whose facility at drawing exceeded even Sickert’s own. Unlike Sickert, he took Mr Delamotte’s optional art classes, and he carried off the Middle School drawing prize in both the Lent 1878 and Summer 1879 terms; he had also exhibited a picture at the Newcastle Arts Association. These were distinctions, however, that counted for little in Sickert’s eyes besides the more important fact that his father – Joseph Crawhall Senior – was a friend of Charles Keene’s. Mr Crawhall would even send Keene jokes from time to time, which the artist might transform into cartoons, sending back a drawing by way of thanks. The presence of these Keene originals on the walls of the Crawhall home was, Sickert believed, the reason for young Joseph’s advanced abilities. He had enjoyed, as Sickert later put it, ‘the advantage of growing up in the most distinguished artistic atmosphere’ available in Great Britain in the late 1870s.24

Sickert, though he had to rely on the printed reproductions in Punch, rather than on originals, steeped himself in the same ‘distinguished’ atmosphere. Outside the circle of aficionados, of course, Keene’s work – though recognized as entertaining – was regarded as anything but distinguished. Keene, to the majority, was no more than a hack cartoonist turning out scenes of vulgar life for a comic weekly, in a style that many considered rather ‘rough’.25 But Sickert – with the example of his own father’s career on the Fliegende Blätter before him – was not inclined to make conventional distinctions between high and low culture; from the start he considered Keene as an artist.

The attractions of Keene’s art to the young Sickert were many. It provided a vivid commentary on the familiar aspects of contemporary life – aspects ignored in most other artworks. From looking at Keene’s drawings Sickert also began to understand the secret of composition. He observed the way in which ‘a situation’ was expressed pictorially by ‘the relationship of one figure to another’, and how figures needed to be conceived ‘as a whole’, rather than being mere appendages of their facial expressions.26 He admired Keene’s eye for the small but telling physical detail. In a picture of a lady remonstrating with her gardener, he would point out delightedly how the artist had drawn the gardener’s trousers, catching ‘the bagginess of the knees’, the result of a lifetime’s weeding: ‘You can see he is a gardener.’27 A love of Keene led Sickert back to discover his forebears: Leech, Cruikshank, Rowlandson, and Hogarth. Bit by bit he pieced together the extraordinarily vigorous tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English graphic art, with its abiding delight in ‘low life’ subjects and suggestive narratives.

In tandem with his enthusiastic study of Keene, Sickert also began to explore the National Gallery. Conveniently placed at the other end of the Strand, in Trafalgar Square, he passed it on his way home from school each day. He ‘saturated’ himself in the collection, and, through the parade of masterpieces, was able to acquaint himself with the outline of Western art history from the Renaissance onwards. (He always retained a belief that ‘chronological’ hanging was the best – indeed the only – way to arrange a major public gallery.28)

The pictorial diet of Keene and the National Gallery gave Sickert an early understanding of the possibilities of art, one that would have been hard to gain at Bedford, or almost anywhere else. As his father remarked with a touch of envy, ‘At your age I had never seen a good painting.’29 But the actual effect of all this stimulation upon Sickert’s own artistic experiments is hard to gauge. Nothing survives. The caricatures that he drew during his school lessons almost certainly reflected his study of Keene, Bryan, and the other popular cartoonists. There is no trace of either Punch or the old masters, however, in the small, well-constructed drawing of a girl sitting by a river, done in the summer of 1876 on the family holiday to the island of Fohr, off the Schleswig coast.* And it was the desire to imitate his father’s Bavarian sous-bois scenes that led him, the following summer, to take his gouaches to Kensington Gardens in order to try and capture the effects of sunlight falling through trees.30

The National Gallery was not the only cultural institution that Sickert began to frequent, nor was Charles Keene the only object of his schoolboy idolatry. Almost immediately opposite the gates of King’s College School stood the entrance to the Lyceum Theatre. Since 1871 it had been under the management of Mr and Mrs Bateman. They had taken the theatre as a showcase for the talents of their third daughter, Isobel, and had engaged the 33-year-old and barely known Henry Irving as their leading man. The theatre had a commercial reputation for being ‘unlucky’, which the early Bateman productions did little to overturn. But – at the end of that first year – Irving persuaded his employers to allow him to mount a production of Leopold Lewis’s horror-piece The Bells. The play proved an immediate and spectacular success. Irving was raised suddenly to a glorious prominence – and the Lyceum was raised with him. His talent, charisma, and commercial acumen transformed the faltering playhouse into one of the leading venues in London. He came effectively to run the place. It was he who chose the productions, took the title roles, and drew the crowds. His style of acting was something strangely new and different, almost overwhelming in its intensity. His readings of the classic parts were often very different from those of theatrical convention, charged with a new sense of psychological truth. But in every role he was recognizably Irving. Whatever the costume, he was a curious and unforgettable figure with his gaunt features, distinctive mannerisms, peculiar pronunciation, and halting gait. But if he commanded attention, he also divided opinion. There were those who carped at his idiosyncrasies, denied his power, and questioned his interpretations. Such dissent, however, merely fired his supporters with greater zeal.31

The teenage Sickert became one of the most zealous of his defenders.* He attended the Lyceum with a passionate commitment and found himself drawn into the orbit of fellow enthusiasts. Despite his comparative youth he was taken up by a group of students from the Slade, the art school attached to University College in Gower Street. They would attend Lyceum first nights en bloc and then crowd outside the stage door to cheer Irving to his carriage at the end of the evening. To be part of this excited band was an intoxicating taste of freedom and community.32

The gatherings were known as ‘rabbles’, and they were mythologized even as they were enjoyed. Arthur Kennedy, one of the leaders of the group, recorded their exploits in mock heroic verse. Their attendance of a performance of Richard III was celebrated by a parody of William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, beginning,

The master of masters is Irving, and his lofty roof-trees stand

In glory of gold and marble, by the river’s golden Strand.

They are high, well-built and glorious, and many doors have they,

But one door is low-browed and mystic and dim and cloudy and grey,

And over its darkling throat, on the very lintel is writ

In letters of fire of magic, the name of the Mouth of the Pit.…

A goodly company are they of damsels and lofty men

And ten are high-born maidens, and fearless knights are ten.

And there on the steps of the threshold they range in a two fold ring,