Walter Sickert: A Life

At the beginning of March he reported excitedly that he was hoping for ‘something’ at the theatre. To prepare himself he went every night ‘to observe’.5 He also took up fencing lessons to improve his posture and fit himself for the swash and buckle of the high Victorian repertoire.6 Through a family friend he was introduced to Irving and put into contact with the person responsible for hiring the company’s ‘supers’ – the non-speaking extras needed for crowd scenes, stage battles, and general ‘business’.7 The Lyceum employed dozens, if not hundreds, of them. Most were mere drudges, ‘small wage earners’ adding to their income by taking on an evening job. But there was a select band of enthusiasts, known in the theatre as ‘Lyceum young men’ – ambitious trainees starting out on their theatrical careers. Sickert joined their ranks. The ‘Lyceum young men’ enjoyed certain small privileges. If any part required some modicum of intelligence or flair – or perhaps even included a line – it was given to one to them. They even had their own green room.8 It is not known in which production Sickert first ‘walked on’; but by the end of the month he was able to get tickets for Alfred Pollard and his sisters to attend the first night of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons.9 For Sickert, at the age of nineteen, to be on stage with Irving and Terry was to savour the full glamour of the theatrical world.10

Despite his lowly status he was acknowledged by Irving and treated with kindly consideration.11 He also came to know Ellen Terry. She lived in Longridge Road, close to the Sickerts’ Kensington home, and sent her two children to the same advanced primary school attended by young Oswald and Leonard.12 Walter developed a crush on her which she graciously indulged. In one letter to Pollard he boasted that he had spent an evening in her company, remarking complacently that friends had begun to suspect that there was some ‘MissTerry’ about his movements.13 On another occasion, after he had taken Helena to a musical soirée at a friend’s house, he made an impromptu call at Longridge Road on the way home, much to his sister’s delight and alarm.14

It was perhaps through Ellen Terry that Walter was introduced to E. W. Godwin. Despite their separation, he and Ellen had remained on close terms: he continued to design costumes for her, and to offer advice upon her acting.* Godwin called at Pembroke Gardens early in the year, and soon afterwards invited Walter to dine with him and his young wife – the painter Beatrice Birnie Philip – at their elegantly underfurnished home in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury, where the white and strawcoloured drawing room was dominated by a life-size cast of the Venus de Milo.15 Although he continued to carry out occasional architectural commissions, Godwin had become increasingly absorbed in his stage work, designing, with a devoted regard for the details of historical accuracy, sets, costumes, and properties. (When asked to make designs for Wilson Barrett’s production of Hamlet, his first step had been to visit Elsinore.) He had many theatrical friends and connections, and was potentially a very useful contact for an aspiring young actor.

For Walter, however, he had an additional attraction. He was a close friend of Whistler. Sickert’s commitment to a career on the stage had done nothing to diminish his passionate interest in the American painter. At the Grosvenor Gallery show that spring, the picture that impressed him most was Whistler’s Golden Girl.16 Godwin could tell him more about his hero. He, after all, had designed Whistler’s home, the elegant and austere White House in Tite Street, Chelsea, along with much of its furniture. The two men had collaborated on projects: they had created an exhibition stand together for the Paris Exposition Universelle the previous year. They shared a common passion for Japanese art and blue-and-white china. They were both members of the St Stephen’s Club and saw much of each other there.

If Sickert’s connection with Godwin brought him closer to Whistler’s world, it did not quite bring him into Whistler’s presence. It was Ellen Terry who, according to legend, was responsible for first drawing Sickert to his hero’s attention. It happened one evening at the Lyceum when Walter was not on duty. Wishing to throw a bunch of violets to Ellen at the curtain call, and anxious that it should carry over the footlights, he weighted his bouquet with lead shot. He rather overestimated the amount needed, and the flowers, after spinning through the air, dropped to the stage with a very audible clunk right next to the greatly surprised Henry Irving. Whistler, who was in the house that night, noted this miniature drama with amusement and took the trouble to discover its perpetrator.17

The two men met soon afterward. From the beginning of May the Forbes-Robertsons hosted a soirée each Friday at their house in Charlotte Street.18 They were exciting and crowded occasions: Mr Forbes-Robertson had a wide connection, and his offspring were numerous, talented, successful, charming, and gregarious. At their parties the worlds of art, letters, and the stage met and the generations mingled. Walter could encounter young actresses and old lions.19 Oscar Wilde, just down from Oxford and embarked upon a career of self-advertisement and poetical affectation, was a regular guest. So was Whistler. It was almost certainly in the crowded studio at Charlotte Street that Sickert was first introduced to his hero.20 The meeting, however, though momentous, was brief, and it was only on the following day, when Sickert by chance saw Whistler entering a tobacconist’s shop and followed him in, that he asked if he might call at his studio.21

Whistler, though he consented, barely had a studio in which to receive his young admirer. Overwhelmed by legal bills after his pyrrhic victory in the Ruskin trial, he had been declared bankrupt at the beginning of May.22 His collections of oriental china and Japanese prints had been sold off at auction along with many of his own works. The bailiffs were in possession of the White House, and bills were already posted announcing its imminent sale. Dispirited but not crushed by these setbacks, Whistler continued to live on in the denuded house, and to keep up a front of spirited defiance. A semblance of the old life continued. It was said that he pressed the bemused bailiffs into service at his Sunday breakfast parties. He found both the time and the heart to show Sickert over his studio. Although much had been sold, and not a little destroyed (to prevent it falling into the hands of his creditors), there was still plenty to admire.

Sickert wrote enthusiastically to Pollard: ‘I went to see Whistler the other day. He showed me some glorious work of his and it was of course a great pleasure to me to talk with him about painting. Such a man! The only painter alive who has first immense genius, then conscientious persistent work striving after his ideal[,] he knowing exactly what he is about and turned aside by no indifference or ridicule.’23 The account betrayed a depth of engagement that went beyond Sickert’s more conventional excitement at the deeds of Irving and Terry.

The tension between his theatrical ambitions and his artistic interests was quickened that summer. In August, when most of the London theatres closed, Walter accompanied the rest of the family to Dieppe. They had rented the Maison Bellevue, Miss Slee’s old school house on the heights of Neuville, for the holidays. The school had finally closed, but Miss Slee herself was still in residence. She was not the only addition to the Sickert party that summer. Various other friends came to stay, and Oscar Wilde accepted an invitation from Mrs Sickert to spend some time with them. Walter was initially suspicious of Wilde, considering him something of a poseur; but he was willing to suspend his verdict because, as he explained to Pollard, ‘firstly E[llen] T[erry] likes him and 2ndly he likes me’.24 Extended exposure encouraged him in this revised opinion. Wilde, beneath the deliberate extravagances of his manner, had real charm. Besides winning over the sceptical Walter, he was a source of delight to the rest of the family. His laughter was ceaseless and contagious. He played happily with Oswald and Leo, and made a special bond with Helena, then a bright but rather bolshy 15-year-old. He would discuss poetry with her, despite her determination to go to Cambridge – the Scientific University. When he caught her frowning doubtfully at the improbable tales he invented for Oswald and Leo’s amusement, he would appeal to her in a tone of mock anguish, ‘You don’t believe me, Miss Nelly. I assure you … well, it’s as good as true.’25

One afternoon he read – or chanted – his Newdigate Prize poem, ‘Ravenna’, to the assembled company as they sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard:

A year ago I breathed the Italian air

And yet methinks this Northern spring is fair …

It was a mellifluous performance, punctuated only by Miss Slee’s schoolmarmish insistence on correcting some minor point of pronunciation, an interruption that Wilde took with good humour.26 Sadly, he was not on hand to help Walter write a comic playlet for the company to act: Walter could have done with the assistance (he felt ‘totally devoid of fancy & originality’ in the field of comic writing) and Wilde might have discovered his true vocation earlier.27

Another visitor was Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was on a walking holiday. His theatrical career was advancing swiftly. He had just been engaged by Irving for the forthcoming season at the Lyceum.28 Although he complained to Helena that he was usually cast in character parts – often as old men – even his geriatric disguises could not quite obliterate his broad-browed, straight-nosed good looks, nor muffle his perfect diction (learnt, so he claimed, from Phelps). At the age of twenty-six, he was beginning to gain the status of a stage idol. And yet he still managed to combine this achievement with his first love: painting. He continued to work on portraits – often of theatrical figures – in the studio at Charlotte Street.29

To Sickert, Forbes-Robertson’s life must have seemed both charmed and desirable: rather than having to decide between painting and acting, he had chosen both. Might he himself not follow suit, and become a star of the London stage and an acknowledged artist? For the moment, however, both goals remained frustratingly out of reach. And the vision paralysed almost more than it inspired him. He lapsed, as he told Pollard, in to ‘such despair about [himself]’ that he was unable to work. ‘As to painting,’ he confessed, ‘I have done nothing.’ He spent most of his time lying in the orchard reading Thackeray: Vanity Fair he pronounced ‘very perfect’.30

Nevertheless he returned to London with a sense of gathering resolve. Although he was still ‘appearing’ rather than ‘acting’ at the Lyceum, he sought to speed up the pace of his progress by mounting some drawing-room theatricals of his own. Together with his friend Justin Huntly M’Carthy (son of Justin M’Carthy MP) he put on a series of performances at the M’Carthys’ house in Gower Street. They acted scenes from Love’s Labour’s Lost (Sickert taking the part of the curate, Sir Nathaniel) together with the Irving staple, Raising the Wind (with Sickert in the Irving role of Jeremy Diddler), and L’Avocat Patelin (in which Sickert reprised his successful KCS performance). Walter devised elaborate make-ups and costumes for his various parts. He was so pleased with his get-up as Sir Nathaniel that he arranged to have himself photographed in costume. Walter marshalled his brothers Robert and Bernhard into minor parts but the productions were clearly intended as a showcase for his talents and as such they were not unsuccessful. Despite, as he put it, getting ‘lost a little’ during one of his Shakespearean speeches, he ‘muddled through somehow’ and no one noticed. Mr Kelly (perhaps Ellen Terry’s husband) promised him a part in a matinée he was putting on at the Gaiety, and also recommended him to ‘a very good agency’.31

In December, Sickert returned to King’s College School to give a performance of Clarence’s Dream from Richard III at the annual prize-giving. The school magazine – edited by his friend Alfred Kalisch – described the recitation as ‘one of the features of the day’: ‘Sickert surpassed himself, and evoked the greatest burst of applause heard during the evening. The only fault of the performance was its shortness. Sickert’s elocution was perfect, distinct without a trace of effort, and his gestures, though few, were most expressive.’ The notice ended with the hope that ‘he may meet with similar success in his professional career’.32

Perhaps on account of this success or by the efforts of his ‘very good agency’ – but most probably through the good offices of E. W. Godwin – Sickert was engaged almost immediately afterwards as a ‘super’ by George Rignold.33 Rignold (a close friend of Godwin’s) was mounting a production of Douglas Jerrold’s once-popular naval drama, Black-Eyed Susan, at the Connaught Theatre in Holborn.34 According to Sickert’s own account, this was his first real break. There was a difficulty in finding among the supers someone who could speak convincingly as the foreman of the jury in the court-martial scene. Sickert, it was considered, would make the most plausible ‘naval officer’, so he got the part.35 By January he had been promoted to ‘first servant’;36 and in February he achieved the distinction of his first proper speaking role as ‘Jasper’ in the English Civil War romance Amos Clark. E. W. Godwin and Beatrice were amongst the friends in the audience to witness this debut.37 It was not a large part. He had only one cue: ‘That man Jasper creeping among the laurels’, at which he made his appearance. The character – as might be guessed from his name and entry line – was a villain. One day, on mentioning to a family friend what part he was playing, Sickert was warned, ‘Take care, don’t let it affect your real character, Walter!’ There was little danger of that. Although he enjoyed piecing together his performances from the external incidents of costume, make-up, and gesture, he seems not to have lost himself in the characters he portrayed, nor in their situations. He never even bothered to read the whole of Amos Clark.38

In tandem with these small theatrical advances, Sickert continued to foster his artistic ambitions.* One interesting avenue, however, was closed off to him. He returned from his holidays to find that Whistler had left England. The painter, bankrupt and homeless, was in Venice, having decamped with his mistress, Maud Franklin, and a commission from the Fine Art Society for a series of etchings. In the absence of his hero, Sickert turned for direction to his father, and Oswald Sickert, satisfied that his son was now making progress on the professional stage (and conscious perhaps that a double career might be possible), was happy to offer him every practical assistance. Walter gained his first semi-formal art instruction by working alongside his father at Pembroke Gardens. There would sometimes be life drawing in the mornings, and Oswald painted a portrait of his eldest son, which must have been instructive for the sitter.39 Walter also worked from the model at Otto Scholderer’s studio in Putney.40

Sickert always claimed that this early instruction he received from his father and Scholderer provided the sound and necessary basis for his whole development as an artist. He certainly picked up good habits from them. He learnt to look, and to set down what he saw – not what he thought he saw. He recalled how Scholderer would chide those who substituted ‘the vapid head of convention’ for what was actually before them, with the remark, ‘Der Gypskopf steckt noch drin’ (The plaster cast is still inside it).41 But besides such particular lessons he also gained something more general: a first understanding of, and connection with, the great tradition of ‘the French school’.42

The tradition that the two men had imbibed in Paris in the 1850s was a distinctive one. It rested upon the conception that painting was divided into three elements: line, tone (the range of light and darkness), and colour. Following the traditional method, as taught at Couture’s studio, these three elements were still applied in three separate operations: an elegant outline drawing was first made on the prepared canvas. To this were added a few simple tonal ‘values’ in a ‘frotté of thin colour’, which was left overnight to dry. Another thin layer of lights and shadows could then be added in portions. In the next stage, a transparent coloured glaze of oil paint was laid over this underpainting with ‘long haired whipping brushes’ in a single process.43 By the time Oswald Sickert and Scholderer had got to Paris this classical arrangement was already being challenged. The development of ready-made conveniently transported oil paints had encouraged artists such as Courbet to experiment with the medium – to lay the oil paint on more thickly, to treat it as opaque rather than transparent. This effected a radical change in practice. Colour and tone were applied in a single operation (the colours being mixed to the right ‘value’ of tone on the palette), and line became a subordinate element.44 Nevertheless, the essential conception of the tripartite division remained as the basis against which these changes were made. And it was a conception that Sickert imbibed from his first teachers. It provided him with the essential framework for his future thoughts about painting, and for their future development.45

Sickert’s friendship with Justin Huntly M’Carthy brought him into contact with the whole secular, literary, intellectual, and politically committed world of Gower Street. The long, sober-fronted thoroughfare, taking its lead from the ‘godless’ institution of University College that stood at its head, exhaled a bracing aura of high-minded enquiry. Its hospitable drawing rooms hummed not only with amateur theatricals, but also with political discussions and intellectual debates. It could not be forgotten that Charles Darwin had written part of On the Origin of Species at one end of the street, or that the Italian political exile Giuseppe Mazzini had found a refuge at the other. At the M’Carthys’, the dominant topic was Ireland. Justin M’Carthy Senior, born in Cork and having come to maturity during the worst years of the Irish famine, was a fervent believer in the need for Irish Home Rule. His successes as a journalist, novelist and popular historian had both supported and furthered a political career, and in 1879 he was elected as an Irish MP for Parnell’s new Irish nationalist party.46 At the home of Mr and Mrs George Robinson, the subject matter was likely to be both classical and literary, and to be led by the Robinsons’ two conspicuously brilliant blue-stocking daughters, Mary and Mabel.47 Benjamin Leigh-Smith’s household – at number 54 – was a beacon for women’s rights; his sister, the watercolourist Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon, was one of the first benefactors of Girton College, Cambridge, and founder of the Society of Female Artists.48

Also staying in Gower Street in 1879 was the New Zealand politician and landscape painter John Crowe Richmond, together with his family. He was over in London not least so that his younger daughter, Dorothy, could gain a good art education. ‘Dolla’ Richmond, as she was known, had started attending the Slade, and was already achieving a reputation there – amongst the tutors as an artist, and amongst her fellows as both a beauty and a devotee of Henry Irving.49 On these two latter fronts she was thought to rival even the lovely Margery May. Sickert, when they met, was very much attracted to her, and they began a bantering, flirtatious friendship. But then it was a period for bantering flirtatious friendships, and Sickert’s was not exclusive.

His attention was drawn, too, by the Cobden sisters, who were friends of the Richmonds, the Leigh-Smiths, the Robinsons, and several other Gower Street worthies.50 Ellen, Jane, Annie, and Maggie: the four, unmarried daughters of the late Richard Cobden were something of a social phenomenon. They were young, beautiful, bright, and – in almost every sense of the word – independent.* Their father, the great apostle of Free Trade, founder of the so-called Manchester School, and scourge of the protectionist Corn Laws, had been the recipient of two large subscriptions from a grateful public during his lifetime, and at his death in 1865 he had divided up the greater part of his estate between his daughters. They were well provided for.* When, in 1877, the death of their mother had left them orphans, they had set up home together at 12 York Place, towards the northern end of Baker Street. Ellen, the eldest girl, was then 29, Jane 26, Annie 24, and Maggie – the ‘baby’ of the family by some way – just 16.

It was a cultured, vivacious household, and also a political one. The sisters remained proudly conscious of their paternal heritage and kept in close touch with their father’s old friends and allies. They espoused advanced causes with great practical energy. They were suffragettes, ‘ere ever the Suffragist movement began’;51 they believed passionately in Irish Home Rule; they supported Free Trade; and they worked to relieve the lot of the London poor. They became friendly with William Morris perhaps more on account of his radical principles than his artistic tastes. Their ardent idealism, however, did not make them solemn. They were sociable and humorous, fond of fun.

The liberal journalist (and Parnellite MP) T. P. O’Connor rated them ‘as beautiful a bevy of fair English girls’ as ever he had seen, with their ‘glowing rosy complexions, large, deep, soft, candid dark eyes’ – eyes which, he considered, held ‘something in the expression that revealed and yet half hid profound possibilities of emotion and compassion’.52 The term ‘bevy’ seems well chosen: there was a certain plump, partridge-like quality about them all. But, despite this point of similarity, they were never in any danger of being mistaken for each other: their colouring was in different shades, and so were their characters. Maggie was spirited and skittish with ‘a peculiar gypsy beauty’; Annie, dark, capricious, artistic, and – so her sisters thought – hard to please; Jane, with her fair hair and firm chin, was the most forthright and practical of the forthright and practical family; while the gold-tressed Ellen had perhaps the most generous spirit.53 They guarded their individuality with care. It was a family rule that, except on special occasions, they did not attend events en bloc.54

Walter, though he almost certainly met them in Gower Street, soon became a visitor at York Place. There was much for him to admire, even to envy, in the life he found there – a world free from parental controls and financial constraints. And the sisters were all so pretty, so entertaining, and so entertained by him. Already rather smitten by Dorothy Richmond, he became rather smitten by all four of the Cobden girls as well – and by their dog, Topsy. And they, for their part, were all rather smitten by their young, self-confident, handsome admirer, with his thick golden hair and irrepressible enthusiasms. Some hint of Sickert’s distinctive charm and the impact it had upon the Cobden clan is contained in Ellen’s autobiographical novel Wistons. Its hero, Robin Yaldwyn – a barely disguised portrait of Sickert – is described upon his first appearance as being ‘more wonderful and more beautiful than it’s possible to imagine’ – like ‘a spirit from some world where no one had ever been unhappy’ whose quick sympathies and charm ‘made all who came into his presence happier’.55 He did everything, Ellen noted, in less conventionally romantic terms, ‘exquisitely, there was a fine personal stamp upon his smallest action, and he drew up his chair to the table, poured out his tea and buttered his toast in a way that gave distinction to tea and toast and table’.56 He was, too, ‘cheerfully interested in all that personally concerned him; his morning toilette completely absorbed him; he enjoyed washing his hands, brushing his hair; it would have pleased him to dress twice for dinner. Yet with all this love of detail there was nothing fussy or finikin about him.’*57 Ellen’s admiration for Sickert’s looks and manner was echoed by her sisters; and, bowered in such appreciative female company, Sickert was in no hurry to decide between its enticing possibilities: with generous indiscrimination he bestowed favours upon all of the Cobden girls.58