Walter Sickert: A Life

If Walter’s frustrated energies sometimes found vent in wildness, he could also direct them into acts of kindness. He charmed the Cobden sisters with improving little gifts: Maggie received, as a Valentine present, a volume of Hans Andersen fairy stories – in German.106 At Easter 1881 he went down to Midhurst, where the Cobdens had a cottage close to their old family home at Dunford, and made a considerable impression on the locals, who thought he must be Maggie’s beau rather than Ellen’s.107 He escorted ever-shifting combinations of sisters to social and cultural events. He was with Maggie at William Morris’s riverside house on Boat Race day, together with a large crowd of other guests (including most of his own family). After the excitement of the race – and the lunch – he captained one side in what Helena remembered was ‘a delirious game of Prisoner’s Base’.108 And on another memorable excursion Walter led Maggie and Annie to the stage door of the Lyceum and introduced them to their idol, Ellen Terry. They presented her with a little bunch of red and white roses, and were rewarded with thanks and kisses. To help them recover from this great excitement he then took them to a little Italian coffee house where they had hot chocolate and ‘maccaroni’.109

When the Sickerts hosted another party that summer, Walter delivered a bunch of sweet peas to York Place in the morning to be divided up between the four sisters, who – ‘contrary to all rule’ – had agreed to attend en masse. On his way over to Baker Street he had, much to his amusement, encountered an old family friend, who, seeing the flowers, remarked, ‘Oh, those are for the beloved. I shall see who wears them this evening.’ He relished the prospect of her confusion when she was confronted by not one but four ‘beloveds’. (There were in fact five ‘beloveds’, as Jessie Thomas was staying at York Place and came to the party wearing her share of Walter’s sweet peas.110)

Despite his small successes with Rignold and at Sadler’s Wells, Sickert’s acting career still stubbornly refused to ignite. He continued to get scraps of work as a super at the Lyceum, and he seems to have appeared at the Globe;111 but there were no substantial roles. It is difficult to know why this should have been. From the very limited evidence available it would seem that he had real, if not an exceptional, ability. He had excellent connections, and no shortage of self-belief. As he declared cheerfully to Maggie Cobden, he was blessed with ‘more advantages than most young men on the stage – namely great physical and intellectual [gifts] & a social position’; and indeed Maggie was mystified as to why the London theatre managers were not courting him. He was looking, she considered, particularly ‘beautiful’ in his new dandified persona: for evening wear he had adopted a splendid opera hat ‘of Irving like proportions’, which he wore inclined slightly over one eye to ‘fascinating’ effect. But if it fascinated Maggie Cobden and her friends, it still failed to attract the notice of London theatrical impressarios.112

His most arduous theatrical engagement during the first half of 1881 was a morning spent with Ellen Terry, ‘flying about Regent Street … having Desdemona night-gowns draped upon him’ as the actress tried to decide on her costume for the forthcoming Lyceum production of Othello.113 Indeed the Cobden girls were more actively involved in dramatic pursuits than he was: they were busy rehearsing a rather overdressed amateur production of Romeo and Juliet.114

Walter tried not to be too downhearted by his periods of enforced idleness. He perhaps drew some comfort from the sad predicaments of his brothers, now both embarked on careers of their own. Robert, having passed his school years ‘in a sort of dream’, had been put into the uncongenial surroundings of a London office. Though conscientious, he was quite unable to interest himself in the duties of a ‘merchant’s clerk’. But he lacked the energy to test his own gifts, such as they were, for comic writing and drawing. Bernhard was faring even worse as an assistant master at a private school, a job for which his sister described him as ‘manifestly unfit’. The boys were ‘all over him’.115 He, like Walter, wanted to be a painter, but his father would not hear of it. And when his teaching career came to a swift and abrupt end, he was found a berth as secretary to the financial editor of The Times – a position made neither easy nor enjoyable by his total inaptitude for figures.116

For Walter, at least, days of ‘resting’ could be pleasurably spent. His free time, though much taken up with the happy distractions of York Place, was not entirely given over to flirtation and courtship. Leisure also allowed him to pursue other interests. He saw something of Godwin. They went together to William Poel’s production of Hamlet at St George’s Hall. Godwin, according to Sickert’s account, ‘had to leave early and asked me to write a paragraph or two on the production for his paper, the British Architect’. Although it was Sickert’s journalistic debut, he had no hesitation in boldly urging that it would be ‘a great loss to the professional stage if Miss Helen Maud [the amateur actress in the part of Ophelia] did not become at once a member of it’.117 It was a good call. Miss Maud (or Maud Holt as she was known off the stage) married the successful actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree the following year, and enjoyed a successful stage-career at his side. Nevertheless, the notice, for all his prescience, did not lead at once to other writing commissions.*

Walter continued to study under his father and to visit Scholderer’s studio, working, as Janie Cobden reported approvingly, ‘pretty hard at his drawing’.118 Staying with the Scholderers at Putney that June was Henri Fantin-Latour, whose freely worked flower paintings were beginning to get a market in England thanks to the efforts of Mrs Edwin Edwards.119 He was another link in the great ‘French tradition’ that Sickert was eagerly discovering. Sickert also made a special expedition with Godwin to see The Sower, a painting by the recently deceased Jean-François Millet that was being exhibited at Number 8 Pall Mall.120 It was his introduction to the work of the so-called Barbizon School. He was impressed by Millet’s carefully constructed picture: a scene of everyday life built up from deep knowledge and accumulated observations. But it did not carry him away as Whistler’s work had done.

Whistler was back in London. After his year-long exile he had announced his return with an exhibition of Venice etchings at the Fine Art Society, closely followed by a show of Venice pastels at the same venue. Sickert feasted upon Whistler’s pictures and became increasingly infected with their vision. On the long summer evenings he would sit in Regent’s Park with Ellen and her sisters, noting the ‘very Whistler like’ effects of the gathering dusk. And then he would try to sketch them.121

For the last ten or so weeks of the summer, Nellie and Maggie Cobden took a house on the far north coast of Scotland.122 Sickert, it was agreed, would join them there. He travelled up to Sutherland at the end of July, and was at once charmed by the setting.123 Rispond House is a fine, almost grand, white-fronted building, set in a perfect little natural harbour near the mouth of Loch Eriboll, a mile or so from the village of Durness. It is a beautiful spot in fine weather, with its little stone jetty, its walled kitchen garden, the hills folding round it, and the clear blue skies stretching northwards towards the Arctic.

The Cobdens were sharing the house with their bluestocking friend Dr Louisa Atkins, who was accompanied by two of her students. Although they dined together, the two parties maintained some lines of informal separation, having the use of the main drawing room on alternate days. The usual tenant of the house, Mr Swanson, an irritatingly garrulous man with a slight facial deformity, had moved into a little house out the back, together with his wife.

Sickert arrived full of his own plans. Maggie described him as being ‘very argumentative & grandfatherly’. His first act was to announce piously that he would be going to bed ‘every night at eight in order to get up at 4 & paint’.124 Perhaps happily for the general harmony of the party he seems to have abandoned this extreme regime, but he did devote much of his time to work.125 Ignoring the rather frequent winds and rains (‘the weather is not all we could desire’) – and Mr Swanson’s unhelpful suggestions as to the most picturesque vistas – Sickert would spend whole days ‘working at some beloved subject’ out in the open air, sometimes sustained by nothing more than a piece of oatcake.126 There were, however, occasional let-ups in the programme, some of them enforced. After painting out of doors for the whole of one dismal afternoon he developed ‘a touch of lumbago’ and had to rest.127

Besides plunging into his work, Walter also plunged into the sea. It was not a great success. Despite being wrapped up in an elaborate costume of his own devising – ‘bathing drawers’ and a white shirt worn over ankle-length merino combinations – he nearly froze.128 Maggie, who had given up bathing after a very brief experiment, was delighted to report that when he appeared at lunch after one swimming expedition ‘he was blue & red in the face – his jaws chattered & his hands were dead white & shook as though he had the palsy’. Although he persisted for a while, even his ardour seems to have been dimmed. Scottish bathing, he began to suspect, did ‘not agree with him’.129 Under the circumstances, he must have been rather impressed by Nellie’s ability to swim each day without ill effect.130

Exposure and lumbago were not the only woes Walter endured at Rispond. He badly turned his knee while trying to re-float Dr Atkins in her rowing boat after she had run aground in the little bay. Although the knee cap clicked back into position at once, it needed to be bound up in bandages. He was forced to keep quiet, and not go ‘prancing over the hills’, for several days. He devoted himself to assuming a new guise, growing his hair and also ‘a dear little moustache & beard of delicate red’, which, no sooner had it been generally admired, than he threatened to shave off. He also found diversion in the novels of the Brontë sisters. He had brought ‘nearly all’ of their books with him, and they provided a common theme for the party. By the end of the holiday both he and the Cobden sisters had the Brontës ‘on the brain’.131 (Wuthering Heights was his especial – and enduring – favourite; he felt that it soared ‘beyond the frontiers of prose’.132) A visit was planned on the way south to the family parsonage at Haworth.

They finally left Sutherland in the second week of October. It took them five days to get home. There were stops not only at Haworth but also at Inverness, Berwick, and York. At York they spent one uncomfortable night at the Leopard, an old inn close to the Minster which Walter seems to have visited during the Yorkshire leg of his Henry V tour, and had been recommending fulsomely to everyone ‘for the last year.’ The Cobden sisters did not share his enthusiasm for the quaint old place. Having groped their way up a pitch-black stairway and been led through a billiard room, they were shown into a tiny bedroom, like ‘the garrets in Hogarth’s pictures’. They insisted on swapping with Walter, who had a slightly less garret-like room on the floor below, but it was a scant improvement. They got no sleep: all night the clock struck the quarters, and in the early hours a large wagon rolled by sounding, as Nellie said, ‘like the Tower of Babel passing’. When they escaped in the morning, they were horrified and amused to meet a London friend – a young clergyman – looking up at the sign and preparing to enter, having been recommended the place by Walter too.133

It is not known whether the Cobden sisters saved the man from his ordeal. They certainly moved to save themselves from any further discomfort. ‘After a great deal of trouble we have taught Walter the difference between an Inn & a Public House,’ wrote Maggie. ‘The dear Leopard is unfortunately the latter.’134 This, of course, is probably what attracted Sickert to it. He was already beginning to develop a relish for the popular, the sordid, and the authentic, for that characterful world first distilled ‘in Hogarth’s pictures’.

The ten weeks that Walter spent at Rispond House marked a watershed. They provided an unprecedented chance for concentrated work and also for concentrated intimacy with Nellie Cobden. It was an opportunity, too, to plan for the future. He had come of age at the end of May and his formal entry into adulthood may have quickened his sense of resolve. By the end of the holiday he had taken two important decisions. He enrolled for a course at the Slade School of Art, and he became engaged to Nellie. The two things may even have been connected.

Helena Sickert recorded that, at this juncture, Walter was ‘helped to follow his true vocation’, while Sickert’s friend and first biographer Robert Emmons states more boldly that Oswald Sickert, ‘seeing that [Nellie Cobden] had a fortune of her own … agreed to his son’s giving up the stage’.135 This, however, may be overstating the case. Nellie certainly wanted to help Walter. She loved him and had come to regard him as a rare talent. And for all her proclaimed belief in feminine independence she regarded it as particularly her vocation to assist the genius of others. As one of her friends noted, ‘she took the part of men and women whose dreams went far and farther than far, provided always they had the courage of their desires’. It seemed to her that to ‘be born with wings and not to fly’ was ‘the commonest tragedy’ of modern life.136 She wanted Walter to escape that fate; she hoped to help him spread his wings and launch himself into the air. Shelley was her ideal (‘as near perfection as human nature had so far reached’),137 and there was, to her, something Shelley-like about Sickert, with his blond locks, his intense energy, his burning commitment. Nevertheless, while she felt sure of his genius, she – like Mr and Mrs Sickert – was not yet quite certain where that genius lay: in the studio or on the stage.

Walter himself was in no hurry to abandon acting completely. His Slade course was only for one year, and the hours were not long. They did not preclude the possibility of theatrical engagements, or eclipse the vision of an artistic reputation being supported by a brilliant stage career. His first step towards a formal art training did little more than mark a tilt in balance between the two spheres of his ambition. It was agreed that Walter and Ellen’s engagement should be for eighteen months: they would marry in the summer of 1883. In the meantime, Walter would continue to live at home, and the arrangement would be kept as a family secret.138 Perhaps after that period the outlines of Walter’s future would be clearer.

The reaction of Nellie’s sisters to the engagement was mixed. Maggie and Annie (as well as Jessie Thomas) were all conventionally ‘delighted’, while Jane Cobden thought ‘Nellie ought to have gone in for a Cabinet Minister’. Maggie, however, confided to Dolla Richmond that Walter was one of the very few people that she herself could have imagined being married to, adding the rather unconvincing caveat, ‘mind, I wasn’t in love with him’. She drew what consolation she could from the thought that others might be similarly disappointed: ‘Won’t there be a shrieking over the length & breadth of the land when [the engagement] is made known.’139

Having decided upon enrolling at an art school, Sickert’s choice of the Slade was all but inevitable. He had spent the previous five years consorting with Slade students, Gower Street was familiar territory to him, and Alphonse Legros, the head of the school, belonged to that same mid-century Parisian art world in which Oswald Sickert, Otto Scholderer, Fantin-Latour, and Whistler had been schooled – indeed Legros, Fantin, and Whistler had formed a short-lived triumvirate, le Groupe de Trois. Sickert first attended on 18 October 1881, two weeks after the beginning of the new term, and almost a week after his return from Scotland.140 Whatever his hopes for the course, they soon foundered. The atmosphere of the school was severe, muted, and academic. The high spirits of the Slade rabble-rousers found no echo inside the teaching studios. The sexes were segregated, classes were small, and the general standard low. First-year students were expected to work exclusively from the cast, toiling from morning to late afternoon with greasy ‘Italian chalk’ to set down on large sheets of unforgiving ‘Ingres paper’ the planes and shadows of some classical figure or Renaissance bust. Legros himself, with his sober, baleful features and grey-flecked beard, was a distant figure. Unable, or unwilling, to speak English, despite his long years of residence – and his marriage to an Englishwoman – he communicated largely through his assistants and subordinates. His comments were terse, his direct instruction limited to painting the occasional demonstration picture in front of the class.141

Sickert’s later verdict on his teacher was harsh, and grew harsher over the years. He recognized the sincerity and, indeed, the achievement of Legros’ art – particularly his etching and his imaginative paintings,142 and he concurred in his deep respect for tradition and the work of the old masters. But he felt that, as a teacher, he was a failure. It was not his métier.

‘Legros,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘has been spoken of as a great teacher, which he wasn’t … A great teacher vivifies not one or two, but hundreds of students directly, and, indirectly, countless ones. He reclaims whole intellectual territories into cultivation, and leaves his mark on generations.’ On all these fronts Legros failed. His professorship, moreover, ‘depleted his creative energy, instead of nourishing it’.

A great teacher is refreshed and inspired, not only by his direct, but by his indirect creation. Legros had no clearly reasoned philosophy of procedure, and did not understand the closely-woven plexus between observation, drawing, composition, and colour. The heads he painted in two hours before his classes, with their entire absence of relation between head and background, were almost models of how not to do it. It is scarcely a paradox to say that a professor of painting should show rather how little, than how much, can properly be done in the first coat of paint, if the last is to crown a work, as distinguished from a sketch.143

It is doubtful that Sickert had worked out all these objections to Legros’ method during the first weeks of his studentship. In the autumn of 1881 he is more likely to have registered only a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

He made no friendships amongst his fellow pupils,144 and the focus of his artistic interest rested outside the school. Whistler remained ‘the god of his idolatry’, and much time was spent at the shrine.145 Whistler was not averse to worship, particularly from so adept a votary. Sickert’s flattery was informed, unflagging, and intelligent. On one visit he pleased Whistler by remarking that what the ignorant public could not abide in his portraits was the uneasy sense that ‘these devil-maycare people were laughing at them’.146 Even better than this, Walter’s admiration was exclusive. He declined, for instance, to share Maggie Cobden’s enthusiasm for a Samuel Palmer exhibition because, as she remarked, for him ‘there is one God, and his name is Jimmy’.147

Whistler knew how to reward such loyalty. It was probably his influence that lay behind the inclusion of one of Walter’s Scottish paintings in a group show at the Fine Art Society that winter. The view of Loch Eriboll was Sickert’s first exhibited picture,148 and it was perhaps in the hope of repaying this favour that, at the beginning of December, Walter took Maggie and Annie Cobden to visit Whistler in his new studio at 13 Tite Street, across the way from the White House – which, with ghastly irony, had been bought by Whistler’s arch enemy, The Times’s art critic, Henry (Harry or ‘Arry’) Quilter. They spent ‘a very good time’ looking at his pictures, and although Annie thought that Whistler’s hospitality had sprung from ‘the goodness of his heart’, Maggie suspected that an unspoken hope that they might commission portraits lay behind the visit.149

Ellen did not accompany them. She was not well again. There had been signs of a decline in her health during the last days of the Scottish holiday, and they had become more marked since the return south. She retired to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast to see what sea air and rest could do for her.150 Walter, however, was kept in London. Rather unexpectedly, his theatrical career had spluttered back to life. Dr Maclear invited him back to perform once again at the KCS Christmas prize day. It was a return to the scene of past triumphs. Doubtless under the influence of Godwin’s theories on period dress, he hired an ‘authentic’ costume from a top outfitters and, splendidly attired in red tights and a black velvet doublet with yellow lined sleeves, revived the scene of ‘Clarence’s Dream’ from Richard III. Maggie Cobden was not entirely convinced. She thought his performance ‘rather too laboured’ and only ‘moderately good’. Stripped of its Irvingesque mannerisms, Walter’s voice, she considered, lacked the power to carry in a big theatre.151 Despite these doubts about his powers of projection, Walter secured ‘a small engagement’ with the Kendals at the St James’s Theatre: Johnston Forbes-Robertson had given him an introduction to Mrs Kendal, and she had been ‘v. sweet to him’. He was to appear in some minor non-speaking capacity in their production of Pinero’s The Squire, as well as understudying two of the leading players. And there was a hope that he would ‘get on’ at this new theatre.152 The play was scheduled to open at the end of the year.

Ellen returned from Aldeburgh before Christmas. The back drawing room at York Place was set aside for her exclusive use. The prime topic of conversation amongst the sisters was where Walter and Nellie should live after they were married. If the question was slightly premature, it was still fun to consider. Campden Hill was the early favourite. It was agreed that each sister – as a wedding gift – would pay for the furnishing and decoration of a different room.153 Annie – who was to be responsible for the dining room – had particularly strong views about interior decor, favouring whitewash instead of wallpaper.154 Walter joined in these deliberations. He would spend his evenings with Ellen, though his days were much taken up with ‘benefitting his soul’ – and learning his part – by sitting in on rehearsals at the theatre.155

The first night of The Squire was on 29 December 1881. Walter, despite being only a ‘super’, threw himself into proceedings with typical energy. He had devised a very elaborate make-up for his fleeting appearance as ‘a toothless old man’ in one of the crowd scenes, and was so proud of it that he challenged his own mother to recognize him.156 It is not recorded whether, during the three-month run, Walter ever had to step up to play either of the parts he was understudying. He did, however, become friendly with one of the actors he was covering for. Brandon Thomas, or ‘Mr Brandon’ as he appeared on the playbill, was a jovial 32-year-old Liverpudlian.157 He was much interested in contemporary art, and was a keen admirer of Whistler’s work. Walter greatly impressed him with his knowledge of painting and, more specifically, with his claims to an actual connection with Whistler.158 It was a connection that was strengthened in the New Year. During the early months of 1882 Sickert’s attendance at the Slade slackened. The demands of the theatre doubtless took their toll, but they were coupled with his growing sense of dissatisfaction at the Legros regime. He confided his disillusionment to Whistler, who is said to have remarked, with characteristic pith, ‘You have wasted your money, Walter: there’s no use in wasting your time too!’159 He invited him, instead, to come and work at his studio, to exchange the conventional world of the art school for the richer Renaissance concept of discipleship to a Master.

It was often suggested, particularly by those who knew him in later life, that ‘to understand Sickert it has to be remembered that he was an actor in his youth’.160 His delight in costume and taking on roles, the range and control of his voice, his sense of the dramatic moment, were certainly very theatrical in their effect, but they were elements of his character that attracted him to the stage, rather than tics he learned while touring the provinces as a ‘Utility Gentleman’. Nevertheless, his connection with the profession, however brief and undistinguished, was important to him. It did colour both his life and his art, and as the years passed he proclaimed it ever more insistently. Theatrical allusions came to litter his conversation. He delighted in recalling thespian anecdotes: the time old Tom Mead, playing the ghost in Hamlet, appeared by mistake directly behind Irving and – in ‘quite a new effect’ – called out, ‘Here. Here’ to announce his presence.161 He used stage vocabulary for non-stage matters, referring to the ‘off-prompt side’ of his pictures. And he would recite huge swathes of Shakespeare impromptu. To the end of his days, his party piece remained a one-man rendition of a scene from Hamlet as played by a motley touring troupe (based surely on the Rignolds). He enjoyed the company of actors; he kept abreast of the London stage. In his art he used the theatre as a subject. But, more than this, his time on the stage gave him a sense of showmanship – of the actor-manager’s role – which he transferred to his artistic career. And though he never played to the audience in his painting, he remained conscious that there was an audience. That communication was part of art – along with laughter, outrage, and applause.