Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 11

Whistler inducted me into some understanding of painting.

(Walter Sickert to John Collier)

From the staid world of the Slade cast room Sickert found himself carried off into the hectic whirl of Whistler’s professional and private life. Not that there seemed to be much distinction between the two. Whistler liked to work amongst a camarade. The large studio room at the back of 13 Tite Street was almost always busy with callers, models, chaperones, sitters, and assistants. Visitors came from Paris and from across the Atlantic. And at the un-still centre of this shifting throng was Whistler himself: the focus of all attention and the source of all energy. He moved constantly about the room with the lightness, neatness, and decision of an armed butterfly: flitting from his table-palette to his canvas wielding his long-handled brushes; poring over portfolios of choice old papers; lovingly inking up his printing plates; drafting letters to the press; and all the time firing off fusillades of sharp laughter and sharper talk.

Sickert found an already established studio retinue. It included a mild-mannered lunatic – a one-time designer for Minton’s pottery – who would potter about, a shadow to the Master, making innumerable sketches on scraps of brown paper. Maud Franklin, Whistler’s slender, buck-toothed mistress, though often ill during 1882, was still in evidence as both model and student. Another more openly acknowledged pupil was the sleek, fair-haired Australian, Mortimer Menpes. Born in Adelaide in the same year as Sickert, he had come to London to study under Edward Poynter. He showed a precocious ability as an etcher, and it was after Whistler had noticed one of his student works that he had abandoned the National Art School and joined the Master’s entourage, assisting him in printing up the first set of Venice etchings.¹ Beyond this inner core, a shifting group of other young artists made up a less formal, but no less devoted, honour guard. A trio of magnificently moustachioed Americans, Harper Pennington and the brothers Waldo and Julian Story, came often to the studio, as did Francis James, a delicate watercolourist of delicate flower pictures. The fashionable portraitist Frank Miles, though an object of mild derision amongst the other followers, called by almost daily from his studio across the way (a studio designed by E. W. Godwin).²

Of the older generation of Whistler’s friends, some few stayed loyal: Godwin, of course, and his young wife; Albert Moore, the painter of self-absorbed classical beauties; Thomas Way, the specialist printer who helped Whistler with his etching. Charles Keene, whose work Whistler admired greatly, was another occasional caller. The prevailing atmosphere, however, was one of youth, and not always very critical adulation. And that was how Whistler liked it. He preferred, so he said, the company of ‘les jeunes fous que vieux imbéciles’.³

There was one notable absentee. Oscar Wilde, who throughout the previous year had been a constant presence at the studio, was away lecturing in America on art and home decoration. It was a year-long tour. But news of Wilde’s triumphs percolated back to Tite Street: he made sure of it by arranging for Whistler to be sent press notices. And the reports of Wilde’s transatlantic triumphs served to sharpen the never quite concealed spice of rivalry that lay beneath the bantering friendship of the two men.^*

Amongst the many who did come to Whistler’s studio, buyers and sitters were disappointingly rare. Whistler’s attempts to woo ‘Society’ at his celebrated Sunday breakfasts achieved only a limited success. Lords, ladies, and plutocrats might come to eat his food and enjoy his wine, but they persisted in regarding him and his art as a sort of ingenious joke. Indeed many of them assumed that Whistler regarded matters in the same light, and thought they were only being polite in laughing.⁴ Others were reluctant to pose for different reasons. After the debacle of the Ruskin trial, and Whistler’s no less public dispute with Sir Frederic Leyland over the bill for the decoration of the Peacock Room, his reputation was suspect. To have one’s portrait painted by Whistler was, they felt, to risk the ridicule of the artistic world, to say nothing of the possible ire of the artist if things did not work out as he wished. Those few who did commission portraits in the early 1880s were either brave or reckless – brazen demi-mondaines, old friends, independent spirits, and Americans. In the absence of more numerous commissions Whistler made use of models both professional and amateur. On occasion he even picked people off the street and invited them to pose at the studio. Failing that, he painted himself or his studio assistants. Sickert was soon pressed into service as a model.⁵

Whistler’s world was totally engrossing – to himself and to those about him. It was a world dominated by art, or by Whistler’s conception of art. His person and his pictures were the twinned and abiding themes of his existence, and Sickert – along with Menpes – came to share the same perspective. Sickert’s commitment was total. With the closing of The Squire in March 1882 he abandoned the stage completely, to concentrate on his discipleship. Menpes has left a vivid account of the daily round: the early summons by hand-delivered note (‘Come at once – important’); the close perusal of the morning post and papers, followed by the excited elaboration of scathing ripostes to any insults, real or perceived; the stroll around the shabby streets of old Chelsea armed with a pochade box (for small oil sketches) or an etching-plate in search of appealing subjects for a morning’s sketching – a street corner perhaps or a humble shopfront; the lunchtime omelette back at Tite Street (the creation of the omelette, being a work of art, fell to Whistler); and then the afternoon of work and talk in the studio.⁶

Whistler staged his indoor pictures with care. Sickert had to help prepare the studio for the various models and sitters, either establishing an elaborately informal mise-en-scène with suitable ‘aesthetic’ props, or erecting the cumbersome black velvet backdrop against which Whistler had taken to posing sitters for full-length portraits.⁷ Before beginning his picture Whistler would mix a quantity of all the tones he would require, and it became Sickert’s duty to set out these carefully prepared paints – in their designated order – on the glass-topped table that served as Whistler’s palette.⁸

Later, the pupils might walk with the Master into the West End to watch him ‘terrorize’ his tailor, his hairdresser, or the various Bond Street art dealers. (His method with these last was to stride through the door of their establishment, pause for an instant, and then exclaim ‘Ha, ha! Amazing!’ in a loud voice before sailing out again.) Or they might make a brief visit to the National Gallery. From there they would continue on a circuit of evening pleasures – receptions and private views, dinner at the Arts Club in Dover Street, very occasionally the theatre or a concert. (Whistler had no ear for music, and by and large found late-Victorian drama considerably less entertaining than his own existence.) The late hours were spent talking amongst friends at the Hogarth Club, the Falstaff, or the St Stephen’s before a walk home along the Embankment to admire the effects of the lamp-lit night over the river.⁹

This well-established routine was carried out against a shifting background of alarms and changes. Whistler, as Sickert soon recognized, liked to live life as a succession of crises.¹⁰ Both unwilling and unable to economize, he existed always on the brink of financial disaster. Other dramas, if less self-willed, were equally disturbing. Within weeks of Sickert’s arrival at Tite Street, the erstwhile pottery decorator had to be removed to a lunatic asylum. Several of Whistler’s precious portrait commissions came to premature ends. Sir Henry Cole, the head of the Kensington Museums, dropped dead (killed, as Sickert liked to believe, by the exertion of having to pose in a heavy Inverness cape).¹¹ Lady Meux, a former barmaid married to a brewery magnate, stormed off after a row, and Lady Archibald Campbell was only just persuaded not to abandon her own sittings following a heated difference of artistic opinion.¹² Such aesthetic squalls were common. Once Whistler was engaged upon a portrait he was tyrannical, demanding endless sittings, and treating his sitter as little more than a pictorial prop.¹³

Whistler, though never slow to give offence, was always quick to take it. He was a master in ‘the gentle art of making enemies’. He nursed grievances with care: to a suggestion that he should ‘Let bygones be bygones’ he replied hotly, ‘That is just what you must never let them be.’¹⁴ He was implacable in opposition, and never forgave. Having fallen from grace, his erstwhile disciples – the devoted Greaves brothers – were either not mentioned or dismissed as ‘negligible’.¹⁵

For Sickert, however, the evidence of such animosities merely emphasized his own privileged position within the charmed circle. And he was very conscious of how privileged it was. To have been suddenly swept into close daily contact with the ‘god of his idolatry’ was an extraordinary thing: the acme of his desires. Familiarity bred only deeper admiration. He found Whistler the man as great as Whistler the painter. In a considered summary of his qualities he described him as, ‘Sunny, courageous, handsome, soigné. Entertaining, serviable, gracious, good-natured, easy-going. A charmeur and a dandy with a passion for work. A heart that was ever lifted up by its courage and genius. A beacon of light and happiness to everyone who was privileged to come within its comforting and brightening rays.’¹⁶

Despite his designation as a ‘pupil’ of Whistler, Sickert was more a studio dogsbody than a student. He received no formal training at Tite Street. Whistler – even if he insisted on being addressed as Master – was not a natural teacher. He had no formulated scheme of how to proceed. ‘All you need to know,’ he told Sickert and Menpes, ‘is which end of the brush to put in your mouth.’¹⁷ Beyond this, lessons had to be learnt indirectly by observation and deduction.

There was plenty of opportunity. Sickert was able to watch Whistler at work every day – in the streets of Chelsea, and at the Tite Street studio. Sometimes he was allowed to paint alongside him from the same model, even on occasion taking his colours off the same palette. Whistler, though completely absorbed in his own work, might dispense the odd – and much cherished – word of general encouragement. Amongst his recurrent utterances were ‘Stick it Sickert’ and ‘Shove along Walter, shove along.’¹⁸ On very rare occasions he might even give a specific demonstration of some technical point. Sickert carefully preserved a ‘little panel of a model’ he had painted, ‘not very well’, and which Whistler finished ‘with some exquisite passages in a lace dress and velvet curtain’.¹⁹ But the pace of instruction could never be forced. Any direct question was likely to be answered with the explosion, ‘“Pshaw! You must be occupied with the Master, not with yourselves. There is plenty to be done.”’ And Whistler would promptly invent some task for his inquisitive assistant – ‘a picture to be taken to Dowdeswell’s [Gallery], or a copperplate to have a ground put on it.’²⁰ For Sickert and Menpes there remained always a tantalizing sense of mystery. ‘We felt’, Menpes recalled, ‘that the Master was in possession of tremendous secrets about art, but we never got within a certain crust of reserve … in which he kept his real artistic self.’ But then, as they admitted to each other, how could they expect that ‘one so great would readily reveal himself’.²¹

Nevertheless, through the days of close contact Sickert began slowly to build up an understanding of Whistler’s working methods. Whistler was a prima painter. He liked to use wet thin paint on wet thin paint, to work quickly, to cover the canvas in a single sitting – or as he put it, to complete the picture in ‘one wet’. There was little margin for error, or scope for correction, in such work. It was a method that required great skill, self-confidence, and no little daring. (Amongst the Whistlerian maxims that Sickert most cherished was the assertion, ‘We have only one enemy, and that is funk.’²²)

In the hands of a master, the prima method could yield a remarkable freshness of effect, a rare and harmonious smoothness of surface. And Whistler was a master. He inspired Sickert with an abiding ‘love of quality of execution’, a sense ‘that paint [was] itself a beautiful thing, with loveliness and charm and infinite variety’.²³ The lore of oil paint – its composition, its preparation, its dilution, and its application – was Whistler’s passion. It became Sickert’s too. Few artists spent more on materials than Sickert, or experimented more with ingredients. The whole ‘cooking side’ of painting absorbed his interest throughout his career. Over time, he acquired a knowledge of oil paint beyond that of almost any of his contemporaries.²⁴ But his knowledge never confined itself to recipes only. As an apprentice at Tite Street, Sickert came to understand that the elusive ‘quality’ that Whistler – and, indeed, all great artists – achieved in their painting was not merely a matter of materials and technical skill, but something more: ‘a certain beauty and fitness of expression in paint’. It might seem ‘ragged’ or ‘capricious’, yet it perfectly expressed the artist’s response to his chosen (and completely understood) subject.²⁵ To achieve for himself this perfect and personal harmony between paint, expression, and subject matter became the great and enduring quest of Sickert’s professional life: an obsession that coloured almost every aspect of his existence. The quest began in Whistler’s studio. And because it was in Whistler’s work that he first glimpsed the ideal, it was through imitation that he first sought to achieve it.

The ways in which Whistler deployed his chosen technique were various. He adopted subtly different approaches for different types of picture. The nocturnes were done from recollection. Whistler had learnt the exacting discipline of training the visual memory in Paris as a pupil of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Legros, too, had studied under Lecoq, but it was in the electric atmosphere of Tite Street, rather than at the Slade, that Sickert was introduced to the practice and became enthused about it. Lecoq’s course had been based on a series of exercises by which the mind was trained to absorb the salient details of a subject (the first lessons involved simple geometric forms) and then accurately to record them away from the motif. Whistler transformed the method into a ‘sort of game’. Sickert recalled walks along the river when he and his master would stop and ‘look for about ten minutes at a given subject, isolating it as much as possible from its surroundings’. And then, while Sickert checked his accuracy, Whistler would turn his back and try to recall the scene: ‘There is a tavern window, three panes wide one each side of the central partition and six panes deep. On the left is a red curtain half drawn … The tone of the roof is darker than that of the wall, but is warm in colour, and precisely the same in value as the sky behind it, which is a deep blue-grey.’ And so on.²⁶ Half marks would be awarded for remembering the position, size, and shape of the various objects that filled the scene and full marks for remembering the exact degrees of light and dark falling on them.²⁷ When he had got all the details right, Whistler would take a last look at the scene before they set off home, walking, for once, in silence ‘so that he might keep the impression fresh’.²⁸ The next morning, at the studio, he would paint the scene.

The Chelsea street scenes, by contrast, were done from life. Working en plein air was a relatively new departure for Whistler, but it suited his interests and his methods. Tiny, fleeting impressions of light and colour, devoid of detail, painted on panels only a few inches across, could be readily set down in ‘one wet’. Portraits were more problematic. They too were done from life, but on a large – almost life-size – scale. Whistler, who took a delight in all practical theories (a delight that he passed on to Sickert), believed that for the sake of pictorial precision it was important to paint to the scale of vision. He explained to Sickert that the human eye ‘could only see at one glance an object which in size was one-third of the distance between the eye and that object. In other words, if you [were] painting a man six feet high you should be 18 feet away from him.’ As a result, Whistler needed a very long studio. He was accustomed to place his model against the black velvet background, and alongside his model he placed his large-sized canvas. His painting table was 18 feet away. He would stand at his painting table, carefully survey the model, then, charging his long-handled brush with the requisite paint (considerably thinned with turpentine), would run at full tilt up to the canvas and drop the colour on the spot. It was an extraordinary performance, and many casual visitors to the studio assumed that it was put on merely for their benefit.

To capture the likeness of a human face and figure on a six-foot canvas in a single sitting was a difficult business. Whistler was not always successful at the first attempt, the second, or even the third and he would demand more and more sittings. But at these there could be no mere correction of the existing work: wet paint could not be put on top of dry paint. At each sitting, Whistler would in effect begin again. The surface of the picture was scrubbed down, and he would repaint the whole canvas. There was no building up of detail, only an ever increasing simplification. But the precious ‘unity’ of the picture – its ‘exquisite oneness’ – was maintained through the multiple operations, until Whistler finally achieved the desired effect and announced that the picture was finished.²⁹ At the end of each sitting there was always a moment of tension, as Whistler pondered his handiwork before passing judgement. Sickert recalled how, once, ‘after long standing on a chair with a candle, at the end of a sitting from Lady Archibald Campbell, and long indecision as to whether he should take out the day’s work or leave it, we went out along the Embankment to dinner. In the street he decided and said to me, “You go back. I shall only be nervous and begin to doubt again. Go back and take it all out” – which I did with a rag and benzoline.’³⁰

Whistler was a printmaker as well as a painter. His earliest prints had been closely worked creations done from drawings, but after his sojourn in Venice he adopted a freer and less laborious approach, working en plein air on small copper plates. Sickert described the new technique as ‘a free and inspired improvisation from nature’.³¹ The method suited Whistler’s febrile talent. He was a brilliant sketcher, with a gift for capturing a fugitive scene in a few lines. In part he was able to do this because of his idiosyncratic theory of composition.³² It was a theory that he passed on to his pupils one evening in a rare moment of direct instruction. Whistler described how in Venice, while drawing a bridge, ‘as though in a revelation’, the secret of drawing had come to him. ‘He felt that he wanted to keep it to himself, lest someone should use it, – it was so sure, so marvellous. This is roughly how he described it: “I began first of all by seizing upon the chief point of interest. Perhaps it might have been the extreme distance, – the little palaces and this shipping beneath the bridge. If so, I would begin drawing that distance in elaborately, and then would expand from it until I came to the bridge, which I would draw in one broad sweep. If by chance I did not see the whole of the bridge, I would not put it in. In this way the picture must necessarily be a perfect thing from start to finish. Even if one were to be arrested in the middle of it, it would still be a fine and complete picture.’” Sickert, Menpes recalled, ‘took down every word on his cuff’.³³

By following Whistler’s methods, Sickert – and Menpes with him – hoped to emulate his results. ‘If we etched a plate,’ Menpes remembered, ‘we had to etch it almost exactly on Whistlerian lines. If Whistler kept his plates fair, ours were so fair that they could scarcely be seen. If Whistler adopted economy of means, using the fewest possible lines, we became so nervous that we could scarcely touch the plate lest we should overelaborate.’³⁴ In their paintings they embraced all the key Whistlerian tropes: the same prima method, the same grey grounds, the same restricted range of low tones, the same turpentine-thinned paint, the same simplified forms, and simple compositions. They laid out their paints in the same order as the Master; and – like him – they laid them out on a painting table rather than a palette.³⁵ Their subject matter was, unsurprisingly, the same, since – whenever possible – they worked alongside their master, recording Chelsea street scenes or figures in the studio. It remained something of a conundrum to them that so much patient emulation did not immediately yield more successful results.

Away from the business of making pictures there were other lessons to be gleaned from the Master. Sickert strove to imitate Whistler in everything. He adopted his dandy’s pose: the pleasure of always shocking and of never being shocked. Already handsome and fastidious, Sickert became ‘picturesque’ in his dress.³⁶ He also drank in Whistler’s whole philosophy of art. Over the supper table at the Hogarth Club, Whistler rapped out his ideas – ideas that he had adumbrated in the witness box at the Ruskin trial and had been honing ever since. The established order of Victorian thought was turned upon its head. In place of the accepted Ruskinian ideal that gave critics authority over artists, and set a value upon art according to how much it might ennoble the spirit or improve society through its uplifting subject matter, its fidelity to nature, its painstaking workmanship, Whistler put forward a host of contrary propositions. He asserted the superiority of the artist to the critic, and claimed for art a complete independence from all social and moral obligations. He decried the anecdotal and literary elements in painting. Art, he suggested, should be concerned, not with telling a story, but with formal beauty. It should be made only for art’s sake. Nature he dismissed as the mere raw material of art, requiring the selective genius of the artist to transform it into something beautiful. And, having established to his own satisfaction that Nature was incoherent and subject matter unimportant, it followed that all subjects were equally possible for the artist, and equally desirable. There was even, he suggested, a virtue in selecting the new or overlooked motif, thus extending the range of art. He himself chose to abstract beauty from what was considered the unpromising ground of contemporary London, the humble streets of Chelsea and the dingy, industrial Thames.³⁷

These were intoxicating ideas. Certainly Whistler was delighted with them, and very irritated that Oscar Wilde seemed to have borrowed so many for his American lectures. In his haste to denounce Wilde for picking the plums from his plate he did, however, rather overlook the debt that his own formulations owed to the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, the two French critics of the previous generation who had first elaborated an amoral, anti-natural philosophy of art. Sickert, though he later traced the ideas back to their French origins, in the first instance accepted them as Whistler’s own, and accepted them enthusiastically.³⁸

Whistler was not content merely to spin theories amongst his disciples: he wished to carry his ideas into the camp of the enemy. He has claims to be the first artist in Britain to adopt the now established procedure of seeking to offend the bourgeois public into acquiescence and admiration. His pose was calculated to affront. He courted controversy. He presented himself as opposed by all the forces of the Establishment – and his disciples were eager to accept the truth of this vision. For them, 13 Tite Street had the glamour of a rebel cell. And it was embattled. For the grandees of the Academy such as Millais and Frith, Whistler was – as Sickert recalled – an abomination.³⁹ Many in the press were hostile, and much of the public uncomprehending. But, as he recognized, all publicity was good, and the media were there to be manipulated. Whistler devoted a great deal of time to lighting the fires of new controversies, or fanning the embers of old ones. Sitters would wait for hours in the studio while he ‘polished a little squib’ for the editor of some periodical.⁴⁰

Sickert, with his classical education and literary bent, proved useful in this game. In June 1882, when the Pall Mall Gazette lamented the apparently unfinished state of Whistler’s Scherzo in Blue at the Grosvenor Gallery, it was Sickert, under the soubriquet ‘An Art Student’, who wrote the ‘very convaincu paragraph’ defending Whistler’s ‘artistic sincerity’ and explaining that, on the day of the press view, the picture was indeed unfinished, had only been hung to ‘take up its space on the walls’, and was afterwards removed and completed.⁴¹ It was the first of many such interventions. Over the next decade, Sickert, as he put it, ‘insisted in season and out of season on the excellence and importance of Whistler’s work’ in whatever papers would print his words.⁴² He would also write letters as from Whistler, and even attribute to him bons mots of his own invention – though Whistler did have to discourage him from devising them in Latin and other languages he did not know.⁴³ He also counselled Sickert against too much subtlety. Rather than working away ‘in a ponderous German manner, answering objections, controverting statements of fact with tedious arrays of evidence’, his advice was ‘simply [to] say “Stocking!” Don’t you know? Ha! Ha! That’s it! That’s controversy! “Stocking!” What can they say to that?’⁴⁴

Whistler liked to present himself as a figure ‘sprung completely armed from nowhere’, owning no allegiances and taking no interest in the achievements of others.⁴⁵ Of the old masters he would remark, ‘they are all old but they are not all masters’.⁴⁶ In expansive moments, though, he might acknowledge a few small artistic debts to Velásquez and Canaletto. He admired Hogarth, and condescended to admit Hokusai as an equal. Amongst his contemporaries he saved his appreciation for the English cartoonists and the French Impressionists. Keene he considered the greatest British artist since Hogarth.⁴⁷ Sickert, of course, needed no introduction to Keene’s genius. He knew rather less, however, of the French Impressionists. In England, knowledge was remarkably limited of the work being produced by Manet, Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and the other painters who, since the mid 1870s, had been exhibiting in Paris under the ‘Impressionist’ banner. The very word ‘Impressionism’ had only just made it across the Channel, but there was still much doubt as to what it signified. To the English critical establishment, Impressionism, as far as it meant anything, meant Whistler,⁴⁸ and this was probably a view that Sickert shared on his arrival at Tite Street. His time there, however, gave him the chance to discover rather more.

Whistler, as his English critics asserted, did have strong links with the movement. He knew all the protagonists well from his time in Paris. Degas had invited him to show in the exhibition at Nadar’s studio in 1874 that gave the Impressionists their name. Though he had declined the invitation, it had not broken the association. In the early 1870s he had exhibited in Paris with Durand-Ruel, the dealer who was championing and promoting Degas, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro. His art shared several of the concerns and tropes of the French Impressionists: modern urban subject matter, simplification of detail, an attempt to capture the effects of light (or, in Whistler’s case, darkness), and an unconcern with academic finish. Sickert had a first chance to assess such similarities and gauge their depth in the spring of 1882. That May, Durand-Ruel exhibited a selection of work by Degas, Monet, and others at White’s Gallery in King Street, St James’s. Sickert visited the show and was greatly impressed. He liked particularly Degas’ painting, Baisser de Rideau, an enthusiasm that shocked Burne-Jones, who was baffled that anyone should either paint or praise ‘the fag end of a ballet’.⁴⁹

That summer, Sickert made an important French connection of his own. Fantin-Latour was in town again, and Sickert went with Scholderer to call on him in Golden Square, at the house of his London agent Mrs Edwin Edwards. He had been sent by Whistler in the hope of persuading Fantin to visit Tite Street. The mission was unsuccessful (Fantin pleaded ill health), but the call was not without profit. In Mrs Edwards’ drawing room Sickert was introduced to another visiting Frenchman, a young painter of his own age called Jacques-Émile Blanche. Blanche, the only son of a highly successful Parisian doctor, was over in London with his ‘mentor’, Edmond Maître, attending a season of Wagner operas.⁵⁰ Sickert liked Blanche at once. Unlike Fantin, he was keen to meet Whistler, and it was arranged that he should attend the next Sunday breakfast party.

Over the following week they saw more of each other.⁵¹ Blanche even extended his stay so that he could cross over to Dieppe with Sickert – who was taking Ellen there, probably along with the rest of his family, for the holidays. Blanche rather rued this act of courtesy when he caught a chill on the crossing and was unable to go on to Bayreuth for the premiere of Parsifal as he had planned. His misfortune, however, did mean that the friendship begun in London could continue and ripen further over the summer.⁵²

It was to prove one of the most productive and enduring of all Sickert’s friendships. Sickert relished Blanche’s intelligence, his worldliness, his knowledge of contemporary art, his genius for gossip, his helpfulness, his passion for painting. Blanche opened up for Sickert a new side of Dieppe life. His family’s house, the Bas Fort Blanc, a hideous half-timbered villa in the modern ‘Norman’ style, was a centre of intellectual and artistic life. Sickert spent time in Blanche’s studio room, which had been decorated with scenes from Tannhäuser by Renoir – indeed Renoir was staying just up the coast and was also an occasional visitor.⁵³ Even if Sickert did not meet him, he certainly heard of his doings from Blanche. It was a further taste of the Impressionist milieu.

Through Blanche, Sickert met Olga, daughter of the Duchesse de Caracciolo, whose villa abutted the Bas Fort Blanc. Olga, though barely into her teens, already possessed a dreamy, fawn-like beauty dominated by great almond eyes set in a pale face. The question of who her father might be remained a matter of excited debate amongst the English and French communities (the Duchesse had numerous lovers and admirers). Many liked to promote the claims of the Prince of Wales. He was the girl’s godfather; might he not be her father too?⁵⁴ Sickert was amused by such tales, and struck by Olga’s peculiar grace. They established a happy, and in due course flirtatious, friendship.⁵⁵

Sickert returned to London exhilarated. He was, as Maggie Cobden reported, ‘blooming’.⁵⁶ Under Whistler’s tutelage he had at last discovered an outlet for his energies. Not that he was entirely free from constraints. He still had no source of income, and perhaps it was to earn money that he undertook several days’ work for E. W. Godwin, researching historical costume designs at the British Museum.⁵⁷ And it may have been for the same reason that, later in the year, he gave some home tuition to the children of Henry Irving.⁵⁸

If things were going well for him, they were faring poorly for Nellie. She was ill again in the autumn, suffering what seems to have been a regular seasonal relapse.⁵⁹ She went down to Margate to recuperate, lodging in the smart Cliftonville area of the town.⁶⁰ Sickert visited her there and loved the place. The Kentish resort with its mid-Victorian flavour, its bracing seawater baths and no less bracing taint of cockney vulgarity – not to mention its associations with Turner – became one of his favoured sites. It also proved beneficial for Nellie. She rallied enough to return to London by the end of the year and throw herself into arrangements for the Suffrage Ball in the coming spring.⁶¹

Sickert had his own arranging to do. All his time was taken up with the preparations for Whistler’s forthcoming exhibition at the Fine Art Society, a second showing of Venice etchings.⁶² There was a mad dash to get everything ready on time. For Sickert, it was an accelerated apprenticeship in the art of printing, as Whistler, through selective inking and wiping and other tricks of the trade, strove to imbue each individual print with its own unique character. The work, though hard, was not without its moments of humour. Sickert recalled once dropping the copper plate he was working on. “‘How like you!” said Whistler. Five minutes afterwards the improbable happened. Whistler, who was never clumsy, dropped one himself. There was a pause. “How unlike me!”’^*63 In their work they were distracted by the reappearance of Oscar Wilde, who returned from his American tour at the beginning of January 1883 and was much at Tite Street, before he headed off at the end of the month to spend his earnings on a three-month stay in Paris.⁶⁴

Despite such diversions, all was ready for the show’s opening on 17 February. For Whistler, an exhibition was not merely a gathering of pictures but a quasi-theatrical event. Every detail had to be addressed. An ‘amazing’ catalogue was produced that quoted some of his critics’ most hostile comments, and the Fine Art Society was redecorated in shades of yellow. For the private view the colour scheme extended to the flowers, the assistants’ neckties, and even Whistler’s socks.⁶⁵ It is not known what sartorial concession Sickert made to the occasion, but he was, of course, there. He introduced Brandon Thomas to Whistler, and was thrilled when the actor commissioned a painting from his master.⁶⁶

The opening of the show brought Sickert relief from his studio duties. He was, as his mother put it, ‘somewhat free again and able to get on with his own work’.⁶⁷ Inspired by Whistler’s example he began to etch his own series of London scenes.^† And though he continued to attend regularly at Tite Street, he took a room nearby at 38 Markham Square in order to have some measure of independence.⁶⁸

Whistler was not entirely approving. He soon found new work for his pupil to do. At the end of April he entrusted Sickert with the task of escorting his painting Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother over to Paris for exhibition at the Salon. Besides the picture, Sickert also took with him copies of the ‘amazing’ catalogue and letters of introduction to Manet and Degas. He was to say to them that Whistler, too, was ‘amazing’. The route was via Dieppe. Sickert retained a clear recollection of ‘the little deal case’ containing his precious charge being hoisted from the hold of the boat and ‘swinging from a crane against the starlit night and the sleeping houses of the Pollet’.⁶⁹ In Paris, he lodged at the Hôtel Voltaire as the guest of Oscar Wilde, to whom he had also been instructed to show the catalogue. ‘Remember,’ Whistler informed Wilde in a covering note, ‘he travels no longer as Walter Sickert – of course he is amazing – for does he not represent the Amazing One.’⁷⁰ Such magisterial condescension was not entirely apt. Sickert, naturally gifted with a remarkable degree of social confidence, had learnt even more poise at Tite Street. He was no mere cipher.

Having seen Whistler’s painting safely delivered to the Salon, he called on Manet but found the artist too ill to receive visitors. Standing in the hallway of the painter’s flat, Sickert only heard his voice, ‘through the open door of his bedroom’, as he instructed his brother, Eugene, to take ‘Whistler’s friend round to my studio and show him my pictures’.⁷¹ Although Sickert left no contemporary record of the visit, he was certainly impressed by what he saw. Manet’s large painting of the bar of the Folies Bergère was there, though Sickert’s most vivid memories were of a pastel portrait of the Irish writer George Moore, and a picture showing ‘Rochefort’s escape from New Caledonia’. He came away with a general impression of freshness, vitality, and excellence. He recognized Manet’s affinities with Whistler – his debt to Velásquez, his freshness of touch, his command of the prima method of painting. And though, such was his loyalty, he hesitated to rank him with ‘the Master’, he acknowledged him as ‘a brilliant and powerful’ artist, an ‘executant of the first rank’.⁷²

Sickert called next on Degas at his flat in rue Pigalle. It was to prove a momentous meeting. Degas was then forty-eight. A crusty bachelor with an acerbic wit, he was developing a reputation as a curmudgeon, if not a recluse. There were few artists in Paris who were not a little scared of him and of his sharp-edged tongue. Sickert, if he knew anything of this, was undaunted by it. Many years later, he gave an account of his visit through what he described as the ‘piquant distorting media’ of Oscar Wilde’s recollection of Degas’ story of the incident:

Degas alleged himself to have been disturbed too early in the morning, by a terrific knocking, and ringing. He had opened the door himself, his head tied up in a flannel comforter. ‘Here at last,’ he said to himself, ‘is the Englishman who is going to buy all my pictures’. ‘Monsieur’, he had said, ‘je ne peux pas vous recevoir. J’ai une bronchite qui me mène au diable. Je regrette’. ‘Cela ne fait rien’, the Englishman is here made to say. ‘Je n’aime pas la conversation. Je viens voir vos tableaux. Je suis l’élève de Whistler. Je vous présente le catalogue de mon maître’ … The visitor had then entered, and proceeded, silently, and with great deliberation to examine all the pictures in the flat, and the wax statuettes under their glass cases, keeping the invalid standing the while, and had ended by ‘Bien. Très bien. Je vous donne rendezvous demain à votre atelier à dix heures’.

The facts, Sickert admitted, were ‘singularly exact’.⁷³

Sickert, true to his intention, followed up the call with a visit to Degas’ studio in the rue Fontaine St Georges. The artist’s consternation at his assured young visitor seems to have quickly dissolved into amusement. Degas’ ‘rollicking and somewhat bear-like sense of fun’ came to the fore. It became his joke to regard Sickert as ‘the typical and undiluted’ Englishman, the authority on all matters of English life and etiquette. He bombarded him with stories of other Englishmen he had known and the foolish things they had said, and quizzed him upon points of national custom. But Degas must have recognized, too, Sickert’s real interest in art, and they found common ground in their admiration of Charles Keene.⁷⁴

Sickert was amazed to discover the high regard in which Keene was held by the French Impressionists, several of whom, he learnt, preserved collections of his work cut from the pages of Punch ‘as models of style’.⁷⁵ To them, he was ‘the first of the moderns’.⁷⁶ Fascinated by his command of chiaroscuro, they regarded him as a fellow ‘painter’, rather than as a draughtsman.⁷⁷ They were as interested in his backgrounds as his figures, praising his depiction of landscape – ‘his snowy streets, his seascapes, his bits of country life’ – as ‘unequalled’.⁷⁸ Monet and Sisley, Sickert was told, derived their handling of trees in sunlight directly from Keene’s drawings of the ‘rampant foliage’ of London squares and country gardens.⁷⁹ Keene saw things ‘never seen before’; he observed the reflected lights in the shadows and depicted them in lines drawn with diluted ink.⁸⁰ These revelations reinforced Sickert’s appreciation of his hero, and reinforced, too, his understanding of the dynamic relation between drawing and painting.

It was a relationship that Sickert could trace in Degas’ own work. He drank in all that was on view: the ballet scenes, the studies of millinery shops, the figure drawings. There were points of contact with Whistler’s art – the engagement with scenes of modern urban life, the fascination with low tone – but there was also the hint of something new: the unconscious drama of people in interiors, the conscious drama of the popular stage, the effects of artificial light, and the sense of pictures not conjured out of paint but built up, planned, and composed in stages from drawings and studies. The full significance of such differences was not at once apparent to Sickert. For the moment it was enough to know that he liked Degas’ pictures, and that Degas seemed to like him.

The trip to Paris gave Sickert a broadening sense of French art, and of the Impressionists.⁸¹ This process of education continued back in England. Durand-Ruel held another exhibition in London that spring,⁸² and Whistler began having sittings from Théodore Duret, a successful wine merchant who was also the champion and friend of the Impressionists. Sickert worked alongside Whistler, producing his own small portrait sketch of the bearded Duret, and learning more of Manet, Degas, and their contemporaries.⁸³

Through much of 1883, Ellen continued to be troubled by her ailments. Her younger sister, Annie, had already beaten her to the registry office (marrying T. J. Sanderson, a reluctant lawyer, would-be bookbinder, and disciple of William Morris),⁸⁴ and it was becoming increasingly clear that her own wedding, planned for that summer, would have to be postponed. Ellen did not join Walter and the rest of his family for a late holiday at St Ives.

Thanks to the arrival of the railway, the little Cornish fishing village was already becoming a magnet for artists and holidaymakers. Amongst the families on the beach that year was Leslie Stephen with his wife, young son, and two daughters – Virginia and Vanessa. Although Sickert thought Mr Stephen looked enormously ‘impressive’ and Mrs Stephen quite ‘superb’, he did not attempt to make their acquaintance.⁸⁵ It was the real life of the place that drew his attention rather than its artistic and holiday existence. He assumed a jersey and top boots and ‘completely won over’ the local fishermen, ‘fascinating them with his kindly bonhomie’.⁸⁶

He did, nevertheless, do some pictures, amongst them a charming little panel of some children sitting on the beach, which in its lightness and brightness – as well as its novel accent upon the figures – perhaps owed something to his recent Parisian discoveries. (Sickert gave the picture to his housekeeper at Markham Square, to show her that he was not completely wedded to the tones of what she called ‘London Mud’.)⁸⁷ To be out sketching on the beach was to be amongst fellow artists, and Sickert found himself engaged in conversation with a young painter called Alberto Ludovici. Ludovici was the son of a well-known artist of the same name, and, although still only in his twenties, he had been drawn into the art establishment. Already he was a member of the Society of British Artists, a prestigious if rather stuffy group and a would-be nursery to the Royal Academy, of which his father was treasurer. Young Ludovici was interested to meet a pupil of the infamous Whistler, while Sickert was intrigued to meet a man so well connected to the art institutions of the capital. They parted in the expectation of seeing each other again in London.⁸⁸

At the end of the summer, when the holiday visitors returned to town, Sickert stayed on and was joined by Whistler and Menpes for a winter painting tour. They all lodged with an old lady in Barnoon Terrace, overlooking the harbour. The rooms – in the universal style of seaside boarding houses – were crowded with overstuffed chairs and ‘aggressive’ ornaments. But even these aesthetic affronts were unable to quash Whistler’s enthusiasm for St Ives, for the seascapes, the boats, and the fishermen. The gentle pace of the holiday season evaporated at once. Whistler had to complete a series of pictures for a planned exhibition early in the New Year at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in Bond Street. He was up at dawn each morning eager for work, delivering ‘reproaches, instructions, taunts and commands’ to his tardy followers. Sickert would often be roused by the noise of Whistler outside his room complaining, ‘Walter, you are in a condition of drivel. There you are, sleeping away your very life! What’s it all about.’ The tone of these complaints became sharper during the course of the stay. Whistler was considerably put out to discover that Sickert was already a favoured personage about the little town and that the fishermen all received him as a ‘a pal’ – indeed presented him, almost daily, with fish from their catch. Sickert gave these trophies to the landlady and as a consequence she, too, held him in very high favour. Whistler, with an irritation that was not completely put on, considered this to be an inversion of the proper order of things. He complained peevishly to Menpes that, as the Master, he – rather than Sickert – should be the recipient of any gifts. Menpes did his best to console him, explaining, not entirely accurately, that Sickert had visited St Ives in his acting days and had a long-established connection with the fishermen of the place.⁸⁹

Despite these minor ructions, a daily routine was established. The three men would set off to paint each morning (after a cooked breakfast – often of fish provided by Sickert), armed with their pochade boxes, their grey-tinted panels, and walking canes. Many of the other artists they encountered could not believe that they intended to do serious work with so little equipment. Most of the painters who gravitated to St Ives during the 1880s were inspired by a strain of realism that they saw as being derived from Courbet and his disciple Bastien-Lepage. While Whistler and his pupils worked on a tiny scale, capturing fugitive impressions of land and sea, they sought to record the scenes and settings of contemporary rural life by painting large, often highly detailed pictures direct from nature. It was a taxing business for the local peasantry who had to ‘pose’ for these scenes, and for the artists who had to work long hours in the open air. Sickert delighted in the memory of one artist who required four fishermen to hold down his easel and canvas with ropes while he worked away in a howling gale.⁹⁰

While Menpes stuck close to Whistler, Sickert ‘almost invariably went off by himself’ for most of the day. But this apparent independence of spirit was tempered by the fact that the paintings he made – ‘sometimes five or six a day’ – were thoroughly Whistlerian in approach and execution.⁹¹ Sickert remained in awe of his master’s handling of the Cornish scenes. Indeed he came to regard Whistler’s pochades – done from life or immediate memory – as his real masterpieces: ‘No sign of effort, with immense result.’ It was, Sickert recognized, ‘the admirable preliminary order of his mind, the perfect peace at which his art was with itself, that enabled him to aim at and bring down quarry which, to anyone else, would have seemed intangible and altogether elusive’.⁹² At times, Whistler seemed almost able to command nature. A wave that he was painting appeared to Sickert to ‘hang, dog’s eared for him, for an incredible duration of seconds, while the foam creamed and curled under his brush’.⁹³ Sickert strove to achieve the same mastery, and Whistler encouraged his efforts, giving him a ‘minute nocturne in watercolour’ that he painted as a demonstration piece from a scene they had all studied together.⁹⁴

The party remained in Cornwall till January 1884. It was, in Menpes’ recollection, a ‘simple happy time’. There were occasional respites from work: days spent fishing from the rocks, with Whistler springing nimbly about in his patent leather pumps. During the long winter evenings there was scope for talk and discussion. Whistler had a chance to refine his ideas on Nature (‘a poor creature after all – as I have often told you – poor company certainly – and artistically, often offensive’).⁹⁵ He also began to evolve plans for the future. Sickert’s chance encounter with Alberto Ludovici seems to have awakened a curiosity in Whistler about the Society of British Artists. He was fifty and still an outsider. Contemporaries such as Leighton and Poynter had achieved established positions at the Royal Academy. What, he began to consider, might he not accomplish with the structure and weight of an institution behind him?

Once back in London, Sickert called on Ludovici and mentioned to him Whistler’s interest in perhaps becoming a member of the SBA. This ‘surprised’ Ludovici, but also intrigued him.⁹⁶ The society was in a sad way: membership was falling; the most recent exhibition had been so poorly attended as to gain a reputation amongst young couples as a ‘most convenient and quiet spot for “spooning”’.⁹⁷ Whistler’s membership would certainly attract publicity. Sickert introduced his master to Ludovici, who – suitably impressed – began to canvas the SBA committee on his behalf. The members had plenty of opportunity for assessing Whistler’s work. It was much before the public that spring. His exhibition of ‘Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes’ (many of them done at St Ives) opened at Dowdeswell’s in May with the usual fanfare and the usual ‘amazing’ catalogue.

The work that Sickert had produced in Cornwall over the winter, though not publicly exhibited, was also seen. He had taken a new studio at 13 Edwardes Square, just around the corner from Pembroke Gardens. As his mother reported proudly, ‘several people whose opinions are worth hearing’ had been there and pronounced his work ‘very good & promising’.⁹⁸ Théodore Duret and Jacques-Émile Blanche were both in town and were very probably amongst the visitors. And if they came, it is more than likely that they brought with them their friend, the art-loving Irish novelist George Moore.

Moore, then in his early thirties, was an extraordinary figure. Sickert had already seen the pastel portrait of him at Manet’s studio and so was familiar with the tall blond apparition: the long colourless face, bulbous eyes, and orange-tinged whiskers. There seemed something sub-aquatic about Moore. He was likened amongst other things to a codfish and a drowned fisherman. But he was an ardent lover of painting and France, as well as of literature and – so he was always bragging – women. He had lived in Paris for much of the 1870s and had even studied art there before embracing literature as his vocation. He had fraternized with the painters and poets of Montmartre and the Rive Gauche, and it was his proud boast that he had received his education over the marble-topped tables at the Nouvelle Athens – a café in the place Pigalle, where his tutors had been Manet and Degas. Along with his absinthe he had drunk in a knowledge of all the new literary and artistic movements that crackled across the Parisian cultural scene: Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, Symbolism.

In his own literary experiments Moore had veered from a flirtation with sub-Baudelarian decadence (he wrote a volume of hot-house verse and claimed to have kept a pet python) to a bracing commitment to brutal naturalism à la Zola. In his artistic sympathies, however, he remained true to the Impressionists. Though living in London, he returned often to Paris and continued to see Degas and Duret – Degas admired him, and told Sickert that he was ‘very intelligent’.⁹⁹ When Manet died, Moore bought two paintings from his widow and continued to keep in touch with the evolving scene.¹⁰⁰

In 1883 Moore had published a novel, A Modern Lover, that dealt with a fictionalized version of the British art world. The anti-hero, Lewis Seymour, a sort of debased version of the hugely successful Lawrence Alma-Tadema, compromises his artistic integrity (and a succession of women) to devote himself to producing trite, but eminently saleable, classical nudes. His dégringolade is contrasted with the career of another painter – Thompson – leader of ‘the Moderns’. Thompson is an artist who depicts ‘acrobats’ and ‘bar girls’ for ‘his own heart’s praise, and for that of the little band of artists that surround him’. But, after years of struggle and neglect, he achieves success, partly through the canny speculations of his dealer, Mr Bendish. The story was clearly – in part – a transposition of Moore’s French experiences into an English setting. Thompson was a composite of Manet and Degas. The ‘Moderns’ were the Impressionists, and Mr Bendish was based upon Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had promoted them. In England there was, as yet, no comparable group: Whistler still stood alone. Nor was there a dealer, like Durand-Ruel, ready to back such a movement. These were gaps that Moore regretted, and that his book pointed up.¹⁰¹

Sickert certainly took note, even if he did not immediately embrace Moore’s vision. In the spring of 1884 the influence and example of Whistler’s work remained paramount. Sickert was still engrossed in making sketchy etchings in the style of Whistler of London courts and thoroughfares. At the end of May, when he went down to Ramsgate, where Ellen was staying with her sisters, it was with the Whistleresque intention of doing ‘some seas’;¹⁰² and on a visit to his old Munich friends the Fowlers at Broadway, in Worcestershire, he made pictures of corn stooks and rural slums.¹⁰³ It was only in August, when he joined the rest of the family in Dieppe, that he seems to have taken stock. He produced a small etching of the circus rider Leah Pinder. It was his first attempt at depicting a popular theatrical subject – such as Degas (or ‘Thompson’) might have tackled.¹⁰⁴

Back in London after the summer, Sickert discovered Tite Street in a state of upheaval. Whistler had taken a lease on a new purpose-built studio at the top of the Fulham Road. He was also looking for a new home. (He and Maud, though their relationship was deteriorating, eventually settled on a house in The Vale, a little rus-in-urbe cul-de-sac off the King’s Road.) In the midst of these practical arrangements the business of his election to the SBA was coming to a head. The committee was still nervous, but Sickert acted to assure Ludovici as to Whistler’s good faith and he, in turn, swayed the havering committee members.¹⁰⁵ On 21 November Whistler was duly elected, just in time to lend the cachet of his name and work to the society’s winter exhibition. It was not necessary to be a member in order to submit work for the show and Sickert, following in his master’s wake, sent in his small ‘portrait sketch’ of Théodore Duret, which was accepted. The debt to Whistler was apparent in both the picture’s style and its subject.¹⁰⁶

Whistler’s appearance in the ranks of the Society of British Artists created consternation amongst the public, and excitement amongst his followers. The circle of Whistler’s young disciples had been growing. Sydney Starr, an accomplished and rather dashing painter from Hull (and a former room-mate of Brandon Thomas’s), became a regular at the studio, as did William Stott, who had recently returned from several years’ studying and working in France.¹⁰⁷ A Canadian-born artist, Elizabeth Armstrong, then living in London with her mother, also gravitated to Whistler’s circle, anxious to learn more about etching.¹⁰⁸ For Sickert, Menpes, Harper Pennington, and the other established followers, these were new friends and allies. Their common enthusiasm for Whistler – and their common ambition to exhibit alongside him at the SBA’s gallery in Suffolk Street – obliterated, for the moment, all rivalries.

They banded together into what Sickert called ‘the school’ of Whistler.¹⁰⁹ They met at each other’s studios, and dined together at cheap restaurants.¹¹⁰ They discussed the Master, his works, and his methods. They undertook to fight his battles and to promote his name. They had, too, their own ambitions. ‘Severally and collectively,’ Menpes recalled, ‘we intended to be great.’¹¹¹ But it was not to be an ordinary greatness. They despised their more conventional artistic contemporaries, those ‘young men of the eighties’, as Sickert later characterized them, ‘admirably tailored with nothing of Vandyck about them but the beard, playing billiards for dear life with the Academicians at the Minerva Club!’¹¹² Their greatness was to be achieved by following the precepts of Whistler; and Sickert, as a designated ‘pupil’ of the Master, was placed right at the heart of this unfolding project.

In the New Year he assisted with the next phase of the Master’s planned assault on the established art world: the Ten o’Clock Lecture. Jealous of Wilde’s successes on the platform, Whistler had determined to mount a lecture event of his own, and Richard D’Oyly Carte, the promoter of Wilde’s American tour, had agreed to produce it. Whistler worked hard arranging his argument and polishing his paradoxes, and Sickert worked hard with him. Some manuscript sheets of the lecture survive in Sickert’s hand, suggesting how active his role was.¹¹³ He also played a part in the practical arrangements, liaising with D’Oyly Carte’s assistant (and later wife) Helen Lenoir. He visited her office many times, and amidst the demands of work even found time to produce an ambitious etching of her sitting at her lamp-lit desk poring over her paperwork.¹¹⁴ When the lecture was given at Prince’s Hall on the evening of 20 February 1885, Sickert caught some of the reflected glory. His significant contribution to the event was certainly recognized by Ernest Brown of the Fine Art Society and Mr Buck of the Goupil Gallery. They invited him to lunch, together with Whistler, in gratitude for a ‘much enjoyed’ evening.¹¹⁵

Whistler was in the ascendant and Sickert rose with him. The portrait that Whistler had made of the Spanish violin virtuoso Sarasate was the main attraction of the SBA’s spring exhibition. At the same show, Sickert exhibited no fewer than four pictures – a view of Ramsgate, two Cornish scenes, and a small flower piece.¹¹⁶ There was, of course, danger as well as opportunity in the association. Critics, although gradually accustoming themselves to taking Whistler seriously, found it convenient to do so at the expense of his imitators and disciples. And the throng of these was ever increasing. Artists beyond the close coterie of Whistler’s studio were beginning to adopt his manner – or, more often, his mannerisms. ‘The power of strong artistic personality,’ remarked the critic from The Academy, ‘has probably never been more plainly shown at an English exhibition than at the present collection in Suffolk Street. Mr Whistler is not only there in force, but the effect of his influence on the younger exhibitors is very plain.’ It was considered a not entirely beneficial force: ‘You can have too much Whistler and Water.’¹¹⁷ Following the same line, the Pall Mall Gazette thought Whistler’s little landscapes ‘vastly amusing’ in themselves, but ‘so bad for the young’. Menpes alone was excused from this general criticism.¹¹⁸ As a further mark of distinction, the Australian was also the first disciple whom Whistler sought to bring with him into the SBA. He was elected at the beginning of June as a ‘member in water colour’.¹¹⁹

These incidents served to remind Sickert how much he still had to achieve. He also began to perceive that the pleasure of being one of the ‘young lions of the butterfly’ was touched with the possibility of being lumped together with various inferior talents. In what was perhaps an attempt to raise himself above the crowd of Whistlerian ‘imitators’, he allowed himself to look beyond the confines of Suffolk Street. That summer he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy with his etching of Miss Lenoir. Along with Menpes he also showed at the Society of Painter-Etchers – a body of which Whistler disapproved (its president was his brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, with whom he had fallen out). The move can hardly have been made without Whistler’s permission, but it marked a first small assertion of self-will. Significantly, he chose to show an etching of young Stephen Manuel that he had made while the boy was sitting to Whistler. ‘My etching was good for me,’ Sickert recalled, ‘being done in once. Whistler’s portrait was bad for him. He was not quick enough for the child, who was wearied with the number of sittings.’ Sickert, with a cheerful presumption of equality, had then told Whistler of his theory ‘that when two people painted from the same thing, the bogey of success sat on one or the other, but not on both palettes’.¹²⁰

Although Sickert’s identification with Whistler’s aims and methods remained intense, he began to put forward his own ideas as to how they might best be effected. It was probably apropos the Stephen Manuel portrait that he wrote to his master, urging, ‘[For God’s] sake don’t attempt to repaint the whole picture to [the] boy’s present condition, but merely touch details. The picture is finished.’ The problems of reworking the entire surface of a large canvas at each sitting – putting one layer of paint on another – also inspired Sickert to make independent experiments. ‘I have tried the petroleum oil on the life-size canvas,’ he wrote excitedly to Whistler of one new paint recipe: ‘it is perfect: not sticky like turps: keeps wet: doesn’t sink in: works quicker somehow, and fresher: five of it to one of burnt oil. I wish you would try it.’¹²¹ The tone of self-assurance was new but unmistakable.

^* Whistler addressed a series of disparaging open letters to Wilde during the course of the year: ‘We, of Tite Street and Beaufort Gardens [home of Mrs Jopling-Rowe], joy in your triumphs and delight in your success; but we are of opinion that, with the exception of your epigrams, you talk like “S[idney] C[olvin] [the Slade Professor] in the provinces”; and that, with the exception of your knee-breeches, you dress like ‘Arry Quilter.’

^* Sickert was not habitually clumsy. Many contemporaries recall the precision – and decision – of his movements. If he did drop things around Whistler it must have been the result of nervous over-excitement.

† Amongst the views recorded were several of St John’s Wood, where Ellen was staying at 10a Cunningham Place, in a house occupied by Miss Leigh-Smith, and the painter, Miss E. M. Osborn.