Walter Sickert: A Life

From this enchanting world he was, however, soon dragged away. Clearly he had not disgraced himself in the role of ‘Jasper’, for Rignold engaged him as a ‘General Utility’ actor – to play five small parts – in a touring production of Henry V.59 He chose (or, perhaps, was obliged) not to appear under his own name, adopting instead the self-effacing alias, ‘Mr Nemo’. The tour opened in Birmingham at the beginning of April 1880 to good reviews and ‘crammed’ houses, before moving – with a blithe disregard for geographical convenience – to Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Bristol, Leicester, and Manchester, playing a week at each venue.60 Rignold, who took the title role, had conceived the production on a grand Victorian scale, with elaborate period costumes and props. He made one entrance wearing full armour and mounted upon a horse. It must have been a considerable burden for the horse. Rignold, though small, was stout, and even out of armour made what Maggie Cobden described as a rather ‘solid’ king. His wife was almost equally solid; she appeared as Chorus in a white Greek dress and yellow frizzy wig.61 For the rest, the company was, according to Sickert, very much ‘in the Music Hall line’. Some of the actors had even begun their careers in the circus and did ‘tight-rope bizness’. Many of them had some difficulty in ‘getting sober by the evening’.62 What they made of their assured, well-connected, well-educated young Utility Player is not known, but Sickert already had a gift for making friendships across the conventional barriers of class and age.

At Birmingham, Sickert’s Lyceum companions, led by Margery May, came down from London to see him; the Cobden sisters also attended a performance.63 He received baskets of roses from admirers, and the Birmingham theatre critic, C. J. Pemberton, a friend of Ellen Terry, invited him to dinner. Pemberton was encouraging about Sickert’s performance, singling out his impersonation of ‘the old man’ taken prisoner by Pistol for special praise.64 It was Sickert’s favourite part, and he certainly made the most of it. The critic for the Liverpool Daily Post gave him a glowing review: ‘An admirable bit of acting was that of Mr Nemo as the Captive Frenchman. The spasmodic fright with which he sharply jerked his head to this side and that between his persecutor and his persecutor’s interpreter was a notable touch of nature.’65 The terms of praise suggest that the lessons he had learned from his father and Scholderer found an echo on the stage. Good acting, like good drawing, depended upon direct observation and selection of the revealing detail: and Sickert was acquiring these skills.

He was thrilled with the review, buying up the local newsagent’s entire stock of the paper and dispatching copies to relations and friends. Ellen Terry was at the top of his list. The notice, he proclaimed with mock pomposity, had made him a ‘public’ figure. He delighted in the position, and in the absurdity of that delight. ‘My enemies’, he informed Pollard, ‘say that now I may always be seen jerking my head at all hours of the day & this is a slander.’66 It was perhaps to fix the moment of his new-found fame that he had his photograph taken on an excursion to the Liverpudlian resort of New Brighton. Staring out from beneath the low brim of his bowler hat, his head thrown back, his jaw thrust out, he assumed a pose of mingled challenge and disdain.

The company was expected to help strike the set at the close of each week’s run, working into the early hours, dismantling flats, and packing up costumes. Nevertheless, life on tour also gave many opportunities for leisure. It was the first time Walter had been away from home since the unhappy days at his Reading prep school, and he savoured his independence. He devoted himself to learning Tennyson’s Maud (‘the most beautiful thing ever written’) on long country walks. He loafed around the Liverpool docks, taking an interest in the shipping. At Birmingham he visited a Turkish bath one afternoon. It had, though, an unsettling effect upon his constitution. He was ill all that evening and ‘in the character of the Bishop of Bourges’ threw up in his dressing room; he needed ‘raw spirits’ to ‘quiet his intestines’.67 He probably needed raw spirits again when, at Manchester, the stage began to give way under Rignold and his horse. Rignold hastily dismounted but Sickert was left holding the animal’s bridle as it stamped its way through the boards. He leaped clear just as the poor beast crashed through the stage.68 The incident brought the first part of the tour to a dramatic conclusion. There was to be a four-month break before the production was revived for a second set of dates.

Sickert and the rest of the company were free for the summer: free to take on other jobs. Sickert’s self-publicizing had not been in vain. One copy, at least, of the Liverpool Daily Post had found its mark. As soon as he returned to London he was engaged by Mrs Bateman to play Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Sadler’s Wells. That he felt confident to master such a large part at relatively short notice was, if nothing else, testament to his impressive (and much envied) verbal memory.69 The production, mounted by Edward Saker, had already been given at Liverpool, Dublin, and Brighton. It was distinguished by the fact that the fairies were all played by children under the age of eleven. The conceit was perhaps more charming in the conception than in the fact. Certainly Sickert’s memory of Oberon, Titania, and their fairy throng was of clumping footsteps rattling the boards of the stage – ‘so lightly, lightly do they pass’!70 The reviewer for Theatre magazine remained unenchanted by the spectacle, though he did allow that ‘the representatives of Lysander and Demetrius … acted fairly well’.71 Sickert appeared at Sadler’s Wells under his own name, or as nearly as the London printer would allow. In the programme his unfamiliar patronymic was rendered as ‘Sigurd’.72 It was a slight but perhaps telling reminder of his semi-alien origins.*

Back in London, Walter gathered up the strands of his social life. They were all plaited together on 1 July 1880, when the Sickerts hosted a dance at Pembroke Gardens.73 The family enjoyed creating such occasions, reviving some of the bohemian merriment of Munich days. Preparations were elaborate. ‘I often think,’ Helena remarked, ‘that rich people can’t know the full delight of giving dances so well as poor people.’

We began to prepare about a week or two beforehand. All the furniture was turned out of the biggest room which we habitually used as a dining-room, and we crowded into the front room. The carpet was taken up and the floor re-stained and polished with beeswax and turpentine. My father did the staining, but we all helped in the polishing. For a day or two beforehand, my mother, with the help of Mary and Emily Pollard (two of our best dancers [and the sisters of Alfred Pollard]) made aspics and consommé and jellies and galantines, while on the great day itself I was pressed into service to make ‘anchovy eggs’ and coffee, and cut sandwiches till my wrist ached. Walter wrote out programmes in his exquisite handwriting and sometimes illustrated select numbers.† The doors of the three ground-floor rooms were taken off, all fenders were removed and we decorated the fireplaces and marble mantelpieces with flowers stuck in banks of moss … It was my father’s job to hang the garden with Chinese lanterns, and so elaborate was my mother’s consideration for her guests that she insisted on having all the doorways and the balcony and steps leading to the garden elaborately washed, so that the ball-dresses should not be sullied.

After the paid musicians who had been engaged for the evening had packed up, Mr Sickert happily played on at the piano till dawn for those revellers – mainly the ‘newspapermen and actors’ – who still had legs to dance.74

Dorothy Richmond came, not in a ball dress but in a ‘white burnouse’.75 What Ellen and Maggie Cobden wore is unrecorded, but they were both there. According to his sister’s estimate, Walter was not a particularly good dancer (Bernhard being the only brother to show any aptitude in that direction), but he was certainly energetic.76 He flirted happily with all three girls, and probably others besides. Nevertheless, despite this generosity with his favours, it was becoming acknowledged in the Cobden-Richmond circle that Ellen Cobden was his especial favourite. And though all retained an easy and affectionate intimacy with Walter, they recognized that Ellen – or Nellie – had at least the first claim upon him.77 It is difficult to fathom how this came about. No early letters between them exist to illumine the origins and progress of their relationship, and on the surface they were not the most obvious pairing. Ellen was twelve years his senior (Maggie Cobden and Dorothy Richmond were Sickert’s almost exact coevals). She was, however, still only thirty-two, and beautiful. Sickert in later life always described her as ‘pretty, absurdly pretty’, though he struggled to define exactly in what her prettiness lay. When pressed, he recalled her wonderful golden hair: ‘That was hair,’ he would murmur. ‘It had lights, it had lights.’78 Other friends insisted that her eyes were her finest feature. Indeed amongst some of her circle she had the pet name ‘Matia’ – from the Greek for ‘eyes’.79 A small pencil sketch that Sickert made of her reveals those eyes set in a fine heart-shaped face, which he imbued with both the sweetness and the melancholy of a Botticelli Madonna.80 Even to Ellen’s contemporaries there seemed something ‘old fashioned’ about her manner and deportment, something suggestive of eighteenth-century France. She was enormously good and kind, but was not a prig. As one friend remarked, ‘like all those to whom men and women were more important than anything else she was a born gossip’;81 and behind her slightly formal exterior she could both enjoy and match Sickert’s challenge of convention. ‘[Walter] and Nellie are at present rowing on the Regent’s Park water,’ Maggie reported of one afternoon excursion. ‘It is pouring so they are doubtless enjoying themselves.’82

When she left for her summer holiday in Switzerland at the beginning of August, Walter (as Maggie reported to Dolla Richmond) was depressed at the departure of his ‘polar star’. Not that the depression lasted long. He rallied enough to see Dolla off on her holiday – she was joining Maggie and Annie Cobden in Germany – and then kept all of them entertained with letters during the course of the summer.83

Sickert’s own summer holiday was spent in Cornwall. He was part of a theatrical house party gathered by the Forbes-Robertsons at Cadgwith in the remote west of Cornwall close to Lizard Head. Johnston was there together with his brother Ian, his sisters Gertrude and Ida (already a widow in her twenties), and various other young friends. Adding a touch of cosmopolitan glamour to proceedings were the fiery Polish-born actress Madame Modjeska and her husband Count Bozertn Chiapowski. Modjeska, after a brilliant career in Poland, had emigrated to America in 1876, where, despite her rather shaky command of English, she achieved an immense success. It was in the hope of repeating this triumph that she had recently arrived in England. As an advertisement for her talents she had given a series of London matinée performances of Heartsease (an English adaptation of La Dame aux Camélias). Johnston Forbes-Robertson at once recognized her talent and made her welcome. She was delighted to escape the heat of London for the Cornish coast and remembered the holiday at Cadgwith as a magical time: ‘In that congenial circle one lived free from conventionalities, taking long walks on the beach or attending the lawn tennis games at the Rectory.’84

The hospitable rector of St Ruan’s, the Revd Frederick Jackson, was an old friend of the Forbes-Robertsons.85 Having so many theatrical celebrities suddenly on his doorstep he begged them to mount a benefit performance in aid of the church repair fund. The idea was eagerly taken up. As none of the local village halls was deemed big enough for such a gala event it was decided to give an open-air performance in the rectory garden. The local coastguards assisted in the construction of the stage: the lawn served as the auditorium, and a screen of mature trees provided the backdrop. The programme was made up of scenes from Heartsease and Romeo and Juliet (Modjeska, though almost forty, cherished an unquenchable ambition to play Shakespeare’s starcrossed lover in the land of the Bard’s birth). Johnston Forbes-Robertson took the male leads in both parts of the bill. Sickert was drafted in to play the ‘père noble’ in Heartsease, and to give himself the necessary gravitas he ordered a false beard from a London costumier. Unfortunately, it failed to arrive and he was obliged to improvise. Snipping some hairs from the tail of a white donkey, he made his own ‘Imperial’. It looked most impressive, though when, during the performance, he bent down to plant a kiss upon Modjeska’s brow at a moment of grand pathos, she almost put him off by whispering, ‘I have never been kissed by a donkey’s tail before.’86 To the end of his life Sickert regarded Modjeska as ‘the greatest actress he had known’. Certainly she was the only star he acted opposite.87

The holiday also had its unstaged dramas. One rain-sodden picnic at the nearby cove was enlivened when the lifeboat alarm was raised. The crew, which rapidly assembled, was short of several members, so Sickert, along with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and a couple of others, volunteered to stand in. They rowed round the headland into the next bay only to find it had been a false alarm. But Forbes-Robertson, who was sharing an oar with Sickert, could not help noticing that his friend was rather less concerned with the urgency of the moment than with ‘the wonderful effect of the white foam dashing against the mighty serpentine rocks’ off the rugged coast. Visual and artistic considerations were, it seems, never far from Sickert’s mind.88 And in the intervals between play rehearsals and sea rescues, there must have been opportunities for painting – and being painted. It was probably at Cadgwith that he produced his little panel titled The Orchard,89 and maybe the holiday also provided him with the opportunity to pose for Johnston Forbes-Robertson – usurping the artist’s own role of Romeo for the portrait.90

The party broke up in the middle of August.91 Sickert had to rejoin the Rignold tour up in Yorkshire. They were performing in Bradford at the beginning of September when Madame Modjeska made her debut at the Grand Theatre, Leeds. Sickert led most of his fellow cast members over to see her. If they were impressed by her acting they were amazed by her dressing room: it was equipped with ‘Hot and Cold’ running water. For days afterwards they could ‘talk & think of nothing but this miracle’.92

At the end of September the Rignold company arrived in London for a short run at the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch. Sickert was assigned lodgings in Claremont Square, at the top of the Pentonville Road. It was a first return to North London since the brief sojourn at Duncan Terrace in the 1860s. The blend of faded elegance and present grime was very different from Kensington. The tall, narrow, Georgian-brick house (just along from one in which George Cruikshank had lived) looked out not on to a central garden-square, but on to the less lovely prospect of a covered reservoir (established there by the New River Water Company). The rooms themselves, however, were pleasant, and even included a grand piano.93

No sooner was he settled back in London than he presented himself at York Place. Maggie Cobden recorded his arrival in a letter to Dolla Richmond, who was on her way back to New Zealand with her family. ‘The subject most interesting to my Dorothy rises before my mind’s eye … I opened the door to him attracted by the family knock & was much surprised to see our friend standing on the door step with very long hair & a large bunch of roses – he is improved as to appearance by his tour, being fatter & with more colour. But London is already beginning to tell. The family congregated in the hall to talk – imagine us round the oak chest – Walter to the right, rather overcome by the meeting – a little husky as to the voice which I thought to be a cold. Janie and I propped against the matting – my favourite position with a good view of the looking glass – Jessie [Thomas, the Cobdens’ cousin] dancing around after her manner with a large sunflower – Nellie arranging roses – the poor roses were overblown & fell in showers on the stone floor.’94

Although Walter begged the Cobdens not to come and see him acting at the Standard, he must have known they would. Along with their friend Theodore Beck they crept in, unheralded, two days later and were charmed by the theatre (‘a beauty inside’), noting particularly the ‘noble curve’ of the – alas, entirely empty – dress circle. They considered Walter’s acting – on the whole – ‘so much better’ than at the start of the tour; although his good notices as the ‘French Prisoner’ had perhaps rather over-encouraged him. When, with ‘his eyes rolling & stiff black hair standing upright on his head’ he dashed on to the stage, collapsed on to his knees and then – as he thought Pistol was about to kill him – rose up on them in an agony of terror, it reminded Maggie Cobden of ‘a Christmas pantomime’. Before the last scene, ‘The Grand Tableau of the Entry into London’, they sent a note round to announce their presence, and were amused to notice that when Walter next appeared on stage he was clutching the scrap of paper.95

Walter met them after the final curtain. He was on a high. He was also ravenously hungry, and on their way home together insisted on stopping at a dairy where he drank off three glasses of milk in quick succession. He escorted the Cobden girls back to York Place on the bus, then stayed to supper and went on talking late into the night. There was a sort of irresistible, if slightly manic, energy about him. Excitement, drama, self-dramatization, not untinged with self-mockery, touched everything he did over the following weeks. He spent much of his limited free time at York Place. ‘Walter is here roughly speaking from morning to night,’ Maggie reported and most of the time he was in what she described as a ‘rampant humour’.96 One Sunday evening he insisted on acting out most of Hamlet for their amusement, taking the different parts in turn.97 The limitations of the ‘general utility’ player were chafing.

He had his photograph taken, looking like the smouldering matinée idol he had not yet become. Off the stage he tried out the part of ‘host’, laying on one hilarious tea party at his book-strewn rooms in Claremont Square, where the company (Nellie, Maggie, Jessie Thomas, Theodore Beck, and a Mr Nicholson) had to make do with an ‘average of one knife to 3 persons’. They then all crowded on to the little first-floor balcony and ‘speculated on the different deaths [they] should die if it gave way’. Within the merry flow of group activity his particular bond of understanding and attraction with Nellie Cobden quietly strengthened.98

There was a brief interruption to these pleasures when, after the Shoreditch residency, the Rignold Company moved down to Exeter on the final stage of the tour. Walter delayed his departure to the last moment in order to snatch an extra day with the Cobden girls. Having told his family that he was travelling down with the rest of the company on the Sunday morning he snuck off instead on a jaunt to Richmond with Ellen and Maggie. It was scarcely a quiet Sunday outing. Walter was ‘uproarious’ throughout the journey, shrieking Irvingesque snatches of dialogue out of the railway carriage window, and down the communication tube into the next carriage. And when they reached Richmond he insisted on them all racing down a steep field. Then they hired a boat and rowed up stream for an hour. Walter’s hair, which had grown into a long golden mane, provoked considerable comment. The holiday fishermen were ‘roused from silence at the sight of the yellow locks’, and wanted to know ‘why he robbed the barber’. Walter remained unfazed by the general interest in his coiffure. He was too busy noting the resemblance of the fishermen on their punts to Leech’s drawings of such scenes.99

They came home on the bus after stopping at an inn where Walter and Ellen shared a ‘tankard of amber ale’. The beer did nothing to quell Walter’s spirits. That evening at York Place, where he stayed till midnight, he was, according to Maggie’s account, ‘more or less mad’, and spent at least some of the time ‘pouring eau de cologne on everyone’s heads’. As if unable to bear the prospect of separation, he turned up again first thing the next morning on his way to the station. Ellen accompanied him as far as Piccadilly before saying a final farewell.100

He looked a romantic figure beneath his flowing mane; his luggage comprised a small carpetbag, a sword, three books, and an Arab blanket. The effect was probably well calculated. Walter was beginning to weave elements of theatricality into his life – to adopt roles, don costumes, and assume guises. By the time of his return to London six weeks later, he had struck a new pose. ‘His appearance was a shock,’ Maggie told Dolla Richmond. ‘All his beautiful locks cut off and the stubby remains brushed straight up his head like a French boy’s’, or a ‘costermonger[’s]’. He was, she remarked, altogether ‘a changeling’.101 He had left a Byronic wanderer, and returned as a barrow-boy. Other changes soon followed. He appeared next as a metropolitan dandy in a very smart frock coat.102 It was but another role in what would become a large – and ever revolving – personal repertoire. In the first instance these masks revealed rather than concealed. They were projections of his own character, dramatizing his interests and his aspirations. The frequent changes, if they suggested a certain restlessness, reflected too a love of variety and of fun. Sickert enjoyed creating a dramatic moment: he knew that his quick changes, outlandish outfits, and extravagant poses had the power to surprise, confuse, even shock.

Despite the mutability of his appearance, he remained constant to the Cobdens. He spent so much of his time with them that his mother finally protested that when next he came to London he should live at York Place altogether. While looking for a new engagement after the end of the Rignold tour, he was free to spend his days chez Cobden, and his evenings going to the theatre.103 He went one evening with Ellen to see Madame Modjeska at the Royal Court (then in Lower George Street, Chelsea); she had gained her desire and, in an echo of that summer’s experiment, was playing Romeo and Juliet opposite Johnston Forbes-Robertson. At Edwin Booth’s Hamlet he saw Ellen Terry sitting in a box surrounded by Forbes-Robertsons and attended by Oscar Wilde; they were too busy talking to pay much attention to the play – or any to Walter. These were tantalizing glimpses of a familiar world that remained – even after a year of effort – still just outside his grasp.104

That December also revealed, for the first time, the limits of Ellen Cobden’s constitution. For all her energy, gaiety, and wit she was prone to sudden collapses and bouts of scarcely defined ‘ill-health’. Although she was happy to go with Walter to the theatre, she was less willing to go on to the parties afterwards. Walter would go without her. His high spirits always added ‘much to the pleasure’ of such occasions, at least according to Maggie Cobden – though some hostesses might have been slightly alarmed at his behaviour. At the Masons’ dance just before Christmas he was ‘excessively wild’, attempting, amongst other antics, to tie some trimming from Maggie Cobden’s dress around his head while quoting the lines from Iolanthe – ‘thy scarf I’ll bind about my plumed helm’. On the way home in the Cobdens’ carriage in the early hours, he roused the neighbourhood by shouting out the ‘curse of Rome’ speech from Bulwer-Lytton’s play Richelieu ‘in an Irving voice’, ending in ‘a sort of frenzied shriek’. The performance startled a timid youth to whom they were giving a lift home. The boy’s alarm, Maggie reported, was only compounded when, on setting him down, Walter ‘was all suavity and enquired tenderly if we couldn’t have the pleasure of taking him right home’. Faced by this sudden and unexpected change in manner the poor fellow fled.105