Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 10

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.

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 2^ndly 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

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

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.

^* The children were originally given the surname Godwin, but it was subsequently changed to Craig after Ellen had been inspired by a trip to Ailsa Craig off the coast of Scotland.

^* When Ellen was appearing in Tennyson’s classical verse drama The Cup, Godwin sketched out for her a series of figures showing which attitudes – according to the evidence of archaeology – would be appropriate for her to adopt in her role as a Greek priestess.

^* Sickert was confirmed in his belief that acting need not, indeed should not, be an exclusive concern when – one evening, while waiting in the wings at the Lyceum – a young actor called Arthur Wing Pinero confided to him his ambitions to be a playwright and his excitement at having had a one-act sketch accepted by Irving for use as a ‘curtain-raiser’ (The Observer, 9 December 1934).

^* They had an elder sister, Kate, who since 1866 had been married to Richard Fisher. Two brothers and another sister had died in infancy.

^* The exact figures are unclear. Cobden’s estate was valued at ‘under £40,000’ at his death. Although Ellen Cobden, when first setting up home, told her mother she would need an income of £250 per annum, she and her sisters appear to have been even better provided for. Jane Cobden’s nephew thought that his aunt had £1,000 a year at the time of her marriage in the early 1890s, although his may have been no more than a symbolic figure, representing substantial wealth. Annie Cobden in 1890, some ten years after her marriage, had an income of around £500 p.a., but it is probable that she had made substantial inroads into her capital by then.

^* Sickert, though he tolerated and even enjoyed mess, was ‘extremely particular about cleanliness’. He had, as one friend recalled, ‘a passion for hygiene’. If he discovered that he had picked up and put on a stranger’s hat, he would wash his head at the soonest opportunity. He liked to take a daily bath (‘Letters to Florence Pash’, 3).

^* Oswald Adalbert had been naturalized in June 1879.

† This is a revelation. Walter’s handwriting – as in his letters to Pollard – was terrible.

^* Sickert’s ‘review’, which he described so vividly in a letter to The Times in 1934, remains a conundrum. It does not appear in the British Architect. He may – as Godwin’s son suggested – have reviewed the play for some other journal. Or perhaps he wrote about a different play. There are several other notices of Helen Maud’s performances in the British Architect during the course of the year. E. W. Godwin’s diary for 10 December reads: ‘Evening to Club. Sigurd [Sickert] came, dined at Criterion & on with him to St George’s Hall amateur performance – Still Waters [Run Deep]. Home directly it was over.’ In the next issue of the British Architect (16 December 1881, 629–30) an unsigned review appeared declaring that the play ‘had a special artistic interest for it gave us another opportunity of seeing Miss Helen Maud act. It is not often that an amateur performance leaves one with any memory or any new light; but in the nature of things, it is at amateur performances that now and again we discover the actor or actress, the unmistakable diamond embedded in the gravel. Rarely indeed do we see on any stage such refined, spontaneous acting as that which Miss Maud showed in playing Mrs Mildmay, curiously free, moreover, from the faults usually incident upon inexperience.’