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Walter Sickert: A Life
Round a radiant lady, their leader, whose name is a month in spring.
The ‘radiant lady’ reference was to Margery May, a Slade scholar (and the future Lady Horne), who was the most impassioned devotee. Amongst the listed assembly of ‘fearless knights’ Sickert was designated as ‘a scholar, well-taught in many a thing,/Who journeyed north to join them, from the College of the King’.33 By this band, Irving was accounted a deity. When the Sickerts’ down-to-earth cook poured cold water on their ‘Irving delirium’ by remarking, ‘After all, Irving’s only a man when all’s said and done’, it came – Walter recalled – ‘as a shock to Margery May, and certainly to me’.34
In imitation of Irving, Sickert began mounting his own Shakespearean productions in the holidays. He named his troupe the Hypocrites, or ‘Hyps’. During the summer of 1877, while staying at Newquay, he dragooned his siblings and friends into performing a cut-down version of Macbeth. It was a radical open-air production staged in an old quarry. The dramatic effect of the setting, however, was slightly undermined when Walter (in the title role) turned his ankle while making his first entrance down the steep scree – and completed the descent upon his bottom, to the ill-suppressed amusement of the three witches.35 It was not the sort of thing that happened to Irving – and Irving was Walter’s model. He developed an arresting impersonation of the great man’s style. At the school prize day that Christmas he caused what the headmaster described as a ‘sensation’ with his rendition of a speech from Richard III in the manner of Irving.36 It was a performance that raised Sickert to a new prominence within the school, eclipsing even his coincidental triumph in the Vice-Master’s German Prize.*
Sickert’s friendship with the Slade rabble-rousers forged an important connection in his mind between art and the theatre. Years later he recalled the benefits of this nexus, and urged the ‘stage’ to draw, once more, closer to the ‘brush’. (He suggested that the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells should offer free seats in the gallery to all art students.) ‘Actors’, as he noted, ‘know there is no propaganda like the enthusiasm of young students’; while the stage offered young painters not only an education in English literature but also a potential subject. Even as a teenager, it seems, Sickert recognized the possibility of making pictures ‘drawn from the theatre’.37
In the short term, his friendship with the band of stage-struck art students served to open up the London art world for him, bringing him into contact with the more vital currents of contemporary painting. Inspired, as he later admitted, in part by ‘intellectual snobbishness’ and ‘the “urge” to compete in agreeing with ladies a little older’ than himself, he began to look beyond the simple pleasures of ‘the narrative picture’ and to fidget after ‘novelty’.38
Artistic novelty was in rather short supply in the London of the late 1870s. The great masters of the previous age, Constable and Turner, were dead, and their heirs were not apparent. The Royal Academy had become stultified by its own commercial success, and had dragged most of the other chartered art institutions along with it. The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – who had promised to reinvigorate art in the 1850s – had gone their separate ways. Rossetti had retreated into seclusion, and no longer exhibited. Holman Hunt stood aloof. Millais had embraced the world, acceding to the Royal Academy, social success, and a highly profitable career as a portrait painter. He was the self-assumed ‘head of the profession’, and he held that the baronetcy he had received was no more than a proper ‘encouragement to the pursuit of art in its highest and noblest form’. He lived in a mansion in Palace Gate, and Sickert would sometimes see him sitting with a friend on a bench in Kensington Gardens, ‘a touching and majestical presence’, resembling more ‘an angelic and blustering personification of John Bull’ than a painter.39 The vast majority of British artists subscribed only too gladly – as one critic has said – to John Wilkie’s ‘cynical formula that “to know the taste of the public, to learn what will best please the employer, is to the artist the most valuable of knowledge”’. And what the paying public wanted was anecdote, sentiment, moral tone, and workmanship. To a society that saw virtue in labour, ‘high finish’ was regarded as the one necessary technical requirement. The other – even more important – criterion was subject matter: it had to be either sentimental or edifying, and – if possible – both. The Baby was the dominant motif of most British exhibitions at this period.40
And yet within the tradition there were some signs of flickering life. George Frederick Watts, though he claimed that his pictures ‘were not paintings but sermons’, was producing works of undeniable force and achievement. There was vitality, too, in both the idealized classicism of Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter, and Albert Moore, and the romanticized realism of a second generation of Pre-Raphaelites – the heirs of Rossetti – led by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.
Arthur Kennedy took Sickert and other Slade friends to Burne-Jones’s house in the North End Road, West Kensington. There they were allowed to look over the artist’s studio and inspect his pictures of gracefully androgynous beings with retroussé noses looking pale and interesting amongst garlands of improbably detailed flora. Sickert was impressed, but grudgingly so. He recognized Burne-Jones as a ‘brilliant draughtsman’ but remained only half-attracted – and half repelled – by his paintings. The realm of ‘strange and exquisite fancy’ that the artist had created, though undeniably powerful, was impossibly alien to Sickert, who possessed almost no sense of ‘fancy’, exquisite or otherwise.41 Nevertheless, despite his artistic reservations he found himself connected – albeit loosely – to this ardent Pre-Raphaelite world. His sister, Helena, now fourteen, was attending Notting Hill High School and had become friendly both with Burne-Jones’s daughter, Margaret, and William Morris’s two girls, Jenny and Mary (known as ‘Jennyanmay’). They often spent their weekends at each other’s houses; Helena would borrow copies of Morris’s beautifully produced Kelmscott books and bring them home. Both Morris and Burne-Jones called on the Sickerts, while Morris’s disciple, William de Morgan, was already known to the family through his connection with the Sheepshanks.42
Sickert encountered Burne-Jones’s work again later in that summer of 1877 at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street. It was the art event of the year. The Grosvenor was a new phenomenon. There had been commercial galleries before, but none conceived on such a scale, nor carried off with such taste. Established by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, it was to be a veritable ‘Temple of Art’, offering the discerning public the chance to see the most up-to-date work in surroundings that suggested an idealized drawing room, or ‘some old Venetian palace’, rather than an overcrowded auction house.43 Burne-Jones was the star of the show, represented by, amongst other major works, The Seven Days of Creation, The Mirror of Venus, and The Beguiling of Merlin. There were pictures by his followers and rivals, minutely detailed, richly coloured representations of myth and legend. One wall glowed with the brooding metaphorical figure-paintings of G. F. Watts, another with the serene, soft-tinted classical beauties of Albert Moore. But it was not these that excited the 17-year-old Sickert. His attention was arrested by three tall canvases hung to the left of the door in the ‘large gallery’. All were interesting, and one was particularly well calculated to appeal: a portrait of Henry Irving as Phillip II of Spain. They were the work of the American-born, Paris-trained artist, James McNeill Whistler.
Sickert, by his own rather heightened account, experienced an artistic epiphany:
To a few, a very few, these and the other [five] canvases by Whistler [on view] came as a revelation, a thing of absolute conviction, admitting of no doubt or hesitation. Here was the finger of God. The rest became mere paint. Excellent, meritorious, worthy, some of it was, but it was mere paint and canvas. Here a thin girl, now in white muslin with black bows, now in a fur jacket and hat, breathed into being without any means being apparent. She stood, startled, in those narrow frames, and stared at you, with white face and red lips, out of nowhere whence she had emerged. There was a blue sea and a sandy shore, with a man in a light grey coat – Courbet, as I afterwards learnt. There was a snow scene in London in a fog, with a draggled little figure shuffling towards a lighted window. No one who was not there can imagine the revelation which these canvases were at that time.44
To most observers the revelation was an unwelcome one. To Millais and W. P. Frith, Whistler was a ‘a sort of Gorgon’s head’, while a critical establishment that set store by subject matter, sentiment, fine detail, and high finish, found his muted, ‘impressionistic’, often subjectless pictures all but incomprehensible.45 Their titles – which borrowed from the vocabulary of music: ‘Nocturne’, ‘Symphony’, ‘Arrangement’ – were an affront to sense. The pictures might be ‘clever’; indeed – according to Millais – they were ‘a damned sight too clever!’ They were certainly alien, and probably dangerous. And like most ingenious alien dangers, they seemed to have their origins in modern France. Whistler, it was acknowledged, was a practitioner of something called ‘Impressionism’, although just what ‘Impressionism’ might be, most critics thought it safest not to enquire too closely: it was enough to know that it came from France and that Whistler was its sole advocate in England. He was also an advocate who demanded a hearing.
Whistler, at forty-three, was already a conspicuous figure. His distinct and dandified appearance – unruly black locks set off by a shock of white hair, Mephistophelean moustache, monocle, wasp-waisted coat, short cane, top hat and Yankee swagger – was fixed by the caricaturists. His astringent comments and sharp witticisms were reported, not infrequently by himself, in the press. His Sunday ‘breakfast’ parties, which lasted most of the afternoon, were notorious. His views on art, interior decoration, oriental porcelain, and gallery design were proclaimed with a self-assurance that often crossed the borders of arrogance. These were things not likely to put off an admiring teenager. Whistler was set up beside Keene and Irving in Sickert’s select personal pantheon.
He was a deity in need of adherents. If the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition had a profound effect on Sickert’s life, it had an even deeper one on Whistler’s. Amongst the pictures he exhibited was one – not much remarked by Sickert – called Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a small canvas of dark blue-blacks scattered – if not spattered – with points of brightness: the image of a firework display. This was the painting that so enraged Ruskin, the ageing arbiter of Victorian artistic taste: the pot of paint flung in the public’s face, for which Whistler had the ‘cockney impudence’ to be asking two hundred guineas. Whistler responded to Ruskin’s intemperate critique with a writ of libel.46
The action drew a battle line through the British art world. Neutrality was all but impossible. Those who were not with Whistler were against him. And most people were against him. The feelings of bafflement, irritation, and scorn that Whistler’s art already engendered in the mind of the gallery-going public became intensified and took on a personal edge as the legal process advanced during 1878. When the case was heard in November, Burne-Jones and W. P. Frith both appeared against Whistler in the witness box; others spoke against him in the press, the studio, and the drawing room. Only a bold few rallied to his standard. Sickert, of course, was of their number. If he did not attend the trial, he followed its progress and lamented its conclusion: Whistler, with much shrillness and no little wit, won the verdict, but gained only a farthing’s damages, a huge legal bill, and the general disapprobation of the public. To Sickert, however, he remained a hero. And when, crowing over his nominal victory, Whistler published an annotated transcript of the proceedings, Sickert bought a copy.47
Walter’s independent life amongst the unchaperoned worlds of the art school and the stage was the cause of some concern at home. Edith, the daughter of Hugh Carter, recalled that as a child she heard Mrs Sickert lamenting, ‘I don’t know what to do about Walter, he is so wayward’, after which pronouncement she (though only aged about five) would not let Walter hold her hand as he accompanied her and her brother to their kindergarten on his own way to school. ‘No,’ she informed him with the moral assurance of the young. ‘You worry your mother.’48 The main worry was Walter’s interest in girls. He had developed a crush on Edith Carter’s mother, Maria, who was barely thirty and very beautiful. Indeed he described her as his ‘first love’. And other less exalted loves seem to have followed soon after. Edith remembered one morning, while playing in the Sickerts’ garden, seeing Walter – still in his evening clothes – sneak into the house ‘by the back alley, in the most extraordinary way’. (She was told not to make any remarks about it.)49
It was clear that Walter had begun to strain the bounds of both home and school life. At King’s College School he had certainly gained that intellectual ‘confidence’ from ‘knowing a little about something’ which he came to regard as the goal of good schooling. At the beginning of 1878, Dr Maclear wrote to Professor Reginald Poole at the British Museum, recommending Walter for a possible post in the Coins and Medals department.50 Mrs Sickert was very grateful for this initiative. There was a tone of real relief in her letter of thanks to Maclear for his good offices: ‘I assure you that we are very grateful to you for your kindness in helping [Walter] to what we believe to be most congenial work. We sincerely believe that [he] will show himself to be worthy of your good opinion and hope that you will continue to feel a kindly interest in him.’51 A job would have the double benefit of occupying Walter’s energies and relieving the Sickerts’ domestic finances.
Anne Sheepshanks, the family’s guardian angel, had died two years previously – in February 1876 – and while Mrs Sickert’s allowance was continued it was not increased. (After various bequests to Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Royal Astronomical Society, the bulk of Anne Sheepshanks’ estate had been left in trust for the support of her last surviving sibling, the recently widowed Susanna Levett.52) Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1878 the Sickerts moved from their home in Notting Hill across to the other side of Hyde Park, to 12 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington. The new house – a three-storey semi-detached villa with an ‘extra wing’ – was bigger, if only slightly, than Hanover Terrace. Built just fifteen years before, with an eye to suggesting, rather than providing, a modest grandeur, the rooms were all too high for their width, and the staircases too narrow to allow two people to pass. The rent – at £90 a year – marked an increase in the family expenses, and must have made the prospect of Walter entering paid employment additionally attractive.53
But it was not to be. Professor Poole was after a pure classicist rather than an all-round linguist. He was impressed by Sickert, however, and offered to assist him if he wished to reapply for another post at a later date.54 Walter returned to school at the start of 1878 and ‘settled down to work in the matriculation class’.55 He enjoyed the challenge of exams and, concentrating his energies, passed with First Class honours.56
His academic achievements were such that they might perhaps have been expected to lead on to university – his friend Alfred Pollard had already gone up to Oxford with a scholarship.57 But the expense of a university education was beyond the Sickert budget.58 Walter, it was recognized, must get a job. Initially, when consulted by his father – during one of their walks together on Wormwood Scrubs – as to his hopes for the future, he had suggested rather unhelpfully that he intended to be ‘An Universalgenie’ (he had been reading a life of Goethe).59 Universal geniuses, however, were not a commodity in the employment market. Besides, Walter’s own views came into sharper focus during his last year of schooling. He was, his sister recalled, ‘in no doubt that his vocation lay in painting’.60
This was the last thing that his parents wanted to hear. Oswald Sickert had dedicated his life to art and was keenly aware that he had not made his living from it. Although the evidence of great artistic fortunes was everywhere to hand – visible in the huge studio-palaces of Melbury Road, Holland Park – such riches were beyond his reach. And they were receding further. The high watermark of Victorian prosperity was already passing. Painting was an overcrowded profession, and Oswald Sickert was being crowded out. He had come to regard himself as a failure.61 It was the Sheepshanks’ allowance rather than the meagre returns from any sales he might make that paid the household bills. And the Sheepshanks’ resources were finite: they could not stretch to provide Walter with the sort of prolonged and dedicated training that Oswald had enjoyed at Munich and Paris. Besides, although he had ‘a great opinion of Walter’s abilities in general’, neither he nor Mrs Sickert believed that they were ‘specialised in painting’.62 He did everything possible to discourage his son from following him in what he described as his ‘chien de métier’.63
In the face of such opposition, Walter made some efforts in alternative directions. He considered applying for the higher division of the Home Civil Service. But this, he discovered, would require three years’ coaching, which would be just as expensive as university.64 He wrote to Professor Poole, asking if places at the British Museum Library might ‘be got separately from [such] general Examinations … and if you think there would be any chance for me’.65 The answer did not encourage him to pursue this course. His father urged him towards any career where he would be sure of earning a living.66 The law was suggested, and given serious consideration67 – although this, too, unless begun in a lowly clerical capacity, would have required some expensive training.
Beyond these conventional options a more tempting vista beckoned. The stage. Extraordinarily, the idea was not thrown out of court. But then, compared to Oswald Sickert’s ‘dog of a profession’, acting had various attractions. It was not a calling that the Sickerts knew to be unremunerative – even if this was only because they knew very little about it at all. It was no longer socially beyond the pale, at least not in the artistic circles frequented by the Sickerts; and, unlike almost all other professions, it required no formal and expensive training, and no fees of entry.
They were encouraged, too, by the example of their friends the Forbes-Robertsons. John Forbes-Robertson, a prolific art journalist and lecturer, lived with his wife and five children in a large house in Charlotte Street, just off Bedford Square.68 His eldest son, Johnston, although having begun an art training at the RA schools, had been obliged ‘by force of circumstances’ to give it up and seek a more immediately rewarding career.69 He had found it on the stage. A family friend had got him a small part in a play at the Princess Theatre. And from that beginning he had managed to make his own way as an actor. He had performed in Samuel Phelps’s company, acted with Ellen Terry on her triumphant return to the London stage, and was steadily in work.70 His younger brother, Ian, was just about to embark upon the same path.71 Here were models for emulation. And if the stage offered little security, it was at least susceptible to energy and talent, and Walter – it seemed – had both.
He rounded off his school career, at the end-of-year Prize Day, by giving a stirring performance as Cardinal Wolsey in a selection of scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.72 To his proud parents, appreciative teachers, and admiring peers, it must have seemed only too likely that he would succeed on his chosen path.
* The ‘Modern Division’ offered a less rigorously academic approach, with vocational courses in book-keeping and map drawing.
* This of course may be because the picture (now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), though found in Sickert’s studio at his death, was not by his hand.
* In 1877, Samuel Phelps, his previous thespian hero, had died at the age of seventy-four. Sickert walked to Highgate for his funeral (RE, 24).
* Sickert’s dramatic experiments did occasionally look beyond the example of Irving. Once, he dressed up as a maid and called on the Carters, pretending to be in search of a situation. He took in the whole family until Mrs Carter’s parting shot – ‘You know I don’t allow any followers’ – induced him to break into ‘an irresistible smile which gave the show away’ (Edith Ortmans, née Carter, TS, Sutton/GUL).
I THE UTILITY PLAYER
I wonder all the managers in London are not after him.
(Maggie Cobden to Dorothy Richmond)
Sickert’s stage career got off to a false start. At the beginning of the New Year of 1879 he collapsed with a bad case of flu and was laid up for almost a fortnight. Although, as he wrote to his friend Pollard, he might have been able to ‘excel in all dying scenes, old men & anything feeble’, his availability was unknown. Instead he was obliged to channel his returning energies into schemes of his own. The days of his convalescence were spent – when not ‘feebly pottering about the neighbourhood with a stick’ – in devising plays. After toying with, and discarding, several ideas he decided to dramatize a novel by the German, G. F. Richter, and then mount a drawing-room production of it. Progress, however, was slow.1
He hoped, on his recovery, to see Mrs Bateman, who had recently taken on the management of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre; but the main focus of his ambition was fixed, unsurprisingly, upon the Lyceum.2 Irving was now in sole charge of the theatre, opening his first production on the penultimate day of the old year, to the rapturous acclaim of his supporters. He had engaged, as his leading lady, Ellen Terry, and in her he found a perfect foil for his own greatness. Her acting was considered to have an unmatched candour, and an emotional depth that owed something to the vicissitudes of her early life.
She came of theatrical stock. The daughter of actors, four of her ten siblings were also on the stage. In 1864, at the age of sixteen, she had given up a successful career as a child star and contracted an ill-advised marriage with the already middle-aged and finicky painter, G. F. Watts. He had been captivated by her distinctive grace, and spent much of their short period together recording it in drawings and paintings. The rest of the time he spent in repenting of his decision to marry. He had hoped, as he put it, ‘to remove an impulsive girl from the dangers and temptations of the stage’, but he soon discovered that the stage could not be so easily removed from the girl. His new wife could create more than enough drama in a domestic setting. After barely a year, they separated.3 Ellen returned briefly to her family, before eloping with the mercurial architect and stage-designer E. W. Godwin. For five years they lived together happily in Hertfordshire, in sin and ever-increasing debt. Ellen bore two illegitimate children, Edith and Edward, before she was lured back to the theatre in 1874.* Her relationship with Godwin did not long survive her return, but in 1877, after finally receiving a divorce from Watts, she married the actor Charles Wardle (who performed under the stage name Charles Kelly), and achieved the haven of stability. At the time of her arrival at the Lyceum she was thirty-one and considered by discerning judges ‘the most beautiful woman of her times’ – even if it remained a mystery just how she achieved this with her pale eyes, long tip-tilted nose, broad mouth, and ‘tow-like’ hair.4 Her presence at the Lyceum added a new lustre to the place. The adulation that had previously been fixed upon Irving alone became fixed upon her as well. She was one half of a twin-headed deity. And she was another reason for Sickert wishing to join the Lyceum company.