Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 12

I know that the Sickerts can’t expect other people to see in Dieppe all that it means to them.

(Oswald Valentine Sickert to Eddie Marsh)

It was as an exhibiting artist with pictures hanging in three London galleries that Sickert finally married Ellen Cobden on Wednesday 10 June 1885 at Marylebone Registry Office. He was twenty-five, she was thirty-six. The occasion appears to have been a low-key, almost impromptu affair. According to legend, Sickert nearly missed the service waiting for his bus to come.¹ It is not clear that either family was represented – though both were certainly well pleased with the match.² Mrs Sickert considered Ellen (or ‘Nellie-Walter’ as she became known in the family, to differentiate her from all the other Nellies) ‘delightful’ and ‘so good & loving to me that she always does me good’.³ Whistler, too, was supportive, presenting the happy pair with a wedding gift of a luxurious green-and-white wardrobe painted by himself.⁴ The prolonged engagement, however, if it had not weakened Sickert’s real affection, had done nothing to raise the temperature of his passion. Three years of waiting had established a pattern to the relationship, increasing Sickert’s sense of independence, and accustoming him to the security of Ellen’s affections and support, while leaving him often at liberty to pursue his own interests, both in work and at play. The bohemian world of the Chelsea studios had often drawn him away from her, and it seems that, even before the marriage, Sickert had begun to have affairs. It was not a pattern he was anxious to break.^*5

To many of their friends, the Walter Sickerts seemed a less than obvious pairing. The journalist Herbert Vivian, who met them soon after their marriage, considered that there never had been ‘such an improbable ménage’ as the ‘conventional’ Ellen and the unconventional Walter.⁶ Blanche thought them more like brother and sister than husband and wife.⁷ Yet they appear to have been happy. They were united by a common interest in Walter’s career and a belief in his talent. Superficially, Ellen made his life comfortable, and he made hers exciting. But there was more. Sickert was capable of great kindness: he nursed Ellen when she was ill,⁸ and he made several tender, almost sentimental, portraits of her.⁹ And from the evidence of Ellen’s partially autobiographical novel, Wistons, it would seem that there were moments of ‘exquisite passion’ in the first days of their marriage.¹⁰ Certainly the romantic conventions were not entirely ignored, and after the wedding they departed for a honeymoon in Europe.¹¹

By the height of the season they were at Dieppe. From 19 August they took ‘a dear little house’ in the rue Sygogne, a narrow street running up from the Front, just behind the Casino.¹² They were in good spirits. Sickert, in his new role as the young husband, had grown a trim pointed beard and moustache and was looking conspicuously smart. (Blanche was amused to note the extent to which the Cobden connection seemed to have ‘helped palliate’ his ‘bohemianism’.¹³) The newlyweds found a cast of friends and relatives assembled and assembling. Sickert’s parents and siblings were installed nearby.¹⁴ Dorothy Richmond, over again from New Zealand, came to stay at the rue Sygogne, as did Ellen’s sister Jane.¹⁵ Whistler was expected later in September. John Lemoinne, the distinguished editor of the Journal des Débats, was also in town with his three daughters. Lemoinne had known Richard Cobden and was anxious to make Ellen’s acquaintance. At the Bas Fort Blanc, Blanche had gathered together a trio of rising young painters – Paul Helleu, Rafael de Ochoa, and Henri Gervex, while the next-door villa, ‘Les Rochers’, had been taken by the popular librettist Ludovic Halévy and his family – an aged mother, pious sister, wife, and two young sons – Elie and Daniel. The Halévys had two house guests: Albert Boulanger-Cavé (a former Minister of the Fine Arts under Louis Philippe), and – as Walter ‘learned with delight’ – Edgar Degas.¹⁶

Degas’ presence animated the whole party and gave to the five households a common bond of interest. The assembled company passed a happy month together in great intimacy.¹⁷ Everyone loved Degas. They listened to his stories and went along with his jokes.¹⁸ Ellen found him ‘perfectly delightful’.¹⁹ Young Oswald Valentine Sickert felt that he should ‘never forget the gentleness and charm of his personality’.²⁰ The great artist was in holiday mood that summer – playful, communicative, and at ease. He posed for a series of humorous photographic tableaux, commissioned from the indigent local photographer, Walter Barnes: one of them was a pastiche of Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer, with Degas taking the central role, flanked by the Halévy sons and the Lemoinne daughters.²¹ He also developed an unexpected tendresse for Ellen’s sister Jane. When she had to return early to England Degas was one of the party that leapt into a small boat to be ferried across the port in order that they might wave her off. He subsequently remarked to Ellen, ‘We have all such an admiration for your sister that we are jealous of one another.’²²

One of Sickert’s abiding memories of Degas that summer was that he was ‘always humming with enthusiasm’ airs from Ernest Reyer’s popular opera Sigurd. He had seen the piece over thirty times since its opening in 1884 (his attendance rate had been helped by the fact that he had been granted the privilege of free entry to the Opera earlier that year), but it is tempting to suppose that his choice of it was in part prompted by the homophony between Sickert and Sigurd.²³ Certainly Degas did pay the occasional musical tribute to his young friend, referring to him as ‘le jeune et beau Sickert’, in a phrase adapted from the song about ‘le jeune et beau Dunois’.²⁴ It was a telling mark of the real amity that grew up between them. The rapport established over those first meetings in Paris two years earlier was built upon. There is an informal photograph of the pair: Sickert standing beside his hero, eager, happy, and alert, with pointed beard, paint box, and straw hat. Degas, as Fantin-Latour had observed to Sickert, was ‘un personnage trop enseignant’ (a too ‘teaching’ personage),²⁵ but this was a quality exactly calculated to appeal to an ambitious young painter, thirsty for knowledge. They went about together, Sickert imbibing all that he could of Degas’ ‘teaching’. On one informal sketching expedition, made together with Blanche, Helleu, and some others into the fields behind the castle, Degas said something that Sickert considered of ‘sufficient importance never to be forgotten’: ‘“I always tried,” he said, “to urge my colleagues to seek for new combinations along the path of draughtsmanship, which I consider a more fruitful field than that of colour. But they wouldn’t listen to me, and have gone the other way”.’ This observation, Sickert noted, was made ‘not at all as a grievance, but rather as a hint of advice to us’. The exact meaning of the hint, if not immediately clear, returned Sickert to the idea that drawing might be the key to painting.²⁶

Sickert also had the chance to watch Degas at work, when he posed as one of a portrait group that Degas made at Blanche’s studio. Working in pastel, Degas began by drawing Sickert, standing in his covert coat at the edge of the group, looking, as it were, off stage. Then he ‘gradually added’ one figure after another – Boulanger-Cavé, Ludovic Halévy, Gervex, Blanche, and Daniel Halévy – each figure ‘growing on to the next in a series of eclipses, and serving, in its turn, as a point de repère for each further accretion’.²⁷ It was a mode of approach that related to the theory of drawing that Sickert had already learnt at Tite Street. Other aspects of Degas’ practice were, however, less familiar to the pupil of Whistler. When they had first taken up their pose, Ludovic Halévy had pointed out to Degas that the collar of Sickert’s coat was half turned up. He was about to adjust it when Degas called out: ‘“Laissez. C’est bien.” Halévy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Degas cherche toujours l’accident”.’²⁸ On another occasion, during a rest in proceedings, Degas invited Gervex (then a young man under thirty) to come and inspect the work in progress. As Sickert recalled the moment, Gervex,

in the most natural manner in the world, advance[d] to the sacred easel, and, after a moment or two of plumbing and consideration, point[ed] out a suggestion. The greatest living draughtsman resumed his position at the easel, plumbed for himself, and, in the most natural manner in the world, accepted the correction. I understood on that day, once for all, the proper relation between youth and age. I understood that in art, as in science, youth and age are equal. I understood that they both stand equally corrected before a fact.²⁹

Sickert was not yet quite confident of his own command of the ‘facts’, but he felt that he was advancing in accomplishment.

He strove to impress Degas with his dedication to work. Ignoring the claims of the holiday season – to say nothing of the honeymoon – he would set off each day armed with his pochade box to record the beach and the town.³⁰ It was a very productive summer. Inspired by Degas’ electrifying presence, Sickert found himself painting with a new fluency and confidence, ‘running in’, as he put it, ‘without conscious operation’. It was ‘an astounding difference’.³¹ All things seemed possible. Though he did attempt some larger works (which he left hanging out of the windows to dry), most of his output that summer was small in scale – little ‘sunlight pochades’.^*32 In what was surely a homage to Degas’ example he painted a small scene of the Dieppe Race Course.³³

Degas came to inspect Sickert’s paintings at the rue Sygogne, and was generous in his praise. He admired their finish. Passing the tips of his fingers over the smooth surface of the little panels he ‘commended the fact that they were “peint comme une porte” [painted like a door]’.³⁴ ‘La nature est lisse’ (Nature is smooth), he was fond of saying.³⁵ He did, however, raise a first doubt about the Whistlerian absence of detail and human interest in Sickert’s pictures. He urged Sickert to look at the works of Eugène Boudin, the painter of small-scale beach scenes who had inspired many of the Impressionists.³⁶ It was an important tip. As Sickert came to realize, where Whistler and some of the other Impressionists ‘tended to use their figures rather as spots to accentuate their landscapes’, Boudin proceeded ‘in reverse order, from the actors to the scenery’.³⁷ Degas also questioned another of Sickert’s Whistlerian traits: his fondness for low tones. Inspecting some of his darker pictures he remarked, ‘tout ça a un peu l’air de se passer la nuit’ (it all seems a bit like something taking place at night).³⁸

Buoyed up by these signs of Degas’ effectual interest, Sickert’s energy was irrepressible. George Moore, who was over on holiday, thought that no one had ever been ‘as young as Sickert was that summer at Dieppe’. He recalled him ‘coming in at the moment of sunset, his paint-box over his shoulders, his mouth full of words and laughter, his body at exquisite poise, and himself as unconscious of himself as a bird on a branch’.³⁹

Sickert’s mounting self-assurance did, however, lead to some moments of unexpected comedy. One chance encounter came to haunt him. Taken by a French acquaintance to see ‘a comrade of his, no longer a youth, who was thinking of throwing up a good berth in some administration in order to give himself up entirely to the practice of painting’, Sickert was introduced to a sturdy man with a black moustache and a bowler hat. ‘I am ashamed to say,’ Sickert recalled, ‘that the sketch I saw him doing left no very distinct impression on me, and that I expressed the opinion that the step he contemplated was rather imprudent than otherwise … his name was Gauguin.’⁴⁰

A happier meeting took place outside the Dieppe fishmarket when Sickert was able to introduce Degas to his father. Oswald Sickert was working on a pastel of the Quai Henri IV, which Degas generously and genuinely admired.^* Walter was delighted to be able to bring together two of his artistic progenitors. He was becoming prodigal of artistic ‘parents’, though he strove to maintain a hierarchy amongst them. Despite all the excitement of Degas’ attention, he still thought of Whistler as his principal mentor. The ‘butterfly’ arrived in Dieppe at the end of September and promptly altered the flavour of the holiday with his nervous energy and restless spirit.⁴¹ Sickert fell into line behind his Master. Blanche was amused to see them head off together with their identical equipment and identical palettes, to set their little folding stools down in front of the same scenes.⁴²

This similarity of outward accoutrement, however, masked the subtle shifts in Sickert’s work that had occurred over the course of the summer. Degas’ influence and advice were already having an effect. Blanche considered that Sickert’s ‘petite planchettes’ – once so sombre – had transformed themselves ‘peu à peu sous l’influence de nos impressionistes’.⁴³ He also registered a change in Sickert’s increased interest in ‘figure drawing’ and in his new accentuation of ‘decorative and architectural pattern’.⁴⁴ But perhaps more significant for Sickert was seeing Whistler and Degas together. He noted the occasional tone of disparagement that Degas affected at Whistler’s grandstanding. Indeed when Sickert had first mentioned to Degas that he was ‘expecting Whistler on a visit’, the French artist had remarked, ‘Le rôle de papillon doit être bien fatigant, allez! J’aime mieux, moi, être le vieux boeuf, quoi?’^† It was a first inkling for Sickert of the sometimes overstrained tension that Whistler set up between his public pose and his private practice as a painter.⁴⁵ And it was reinforced by other similarly caustic comments.^* Sickert was amazed to notice that Whistler – the terror of the London drawing rooms – was somewhat in awe of Degas, and wary of his tongue. When Whistler gave an informal lecture one evening at the rue Sygogne on ‘The Secret of Art’ – a sort of scaled down version of the Ten o’Clock Lecture – Degas, though amused, was not unduly impressed.⁴⁶ Sickert’s own status, too, was changing. He was now a married man, with an independently wealthy wife, whilst Whistler was still a not very prosperous bachelor. During the course of the holiday Sickert lent his master £5.⁴⁷

The party broke up gradually towards the end of September. Degas returned to Paris ahead of the group, though he urged Sickert and Ellen to come and visit him there before they went back to London: ‘He said we must see a great deal of him in Paris at the beginning of next month,’ Ellen reported. ‘I do think he is perfectly delightful.’ And the sincerity of his invitation was reinforced by several kind messages.⁴⁸ It was too good an opportunity to miss.

In October, Walter and Ellen were in Paris. They called on Degas and were warmly received; his only sadness was that Jane Cobden could not be there as well. (As Ellen remarked teasingly to her sister, ‘You might do worse, Janie dear!’⁴⁹) He invited them to dine with him one evening, together with his ‘very best friends’, the artist Paul Bartholomé and his wife. There was also an opportunity to see his work.⁵⁰ He showed them some of his recent pastels – studies of unselfconscious women washing and drying themselves. Painters, he remarked, were too apt to make ‘formal portraits’ of women rather than allowing ‘their hundred and one gestures, their chatteries’ to inspire an infinite variety of design. ‘Je veux,’ he remarked, ‘regarder par le trou de la serrure [I wish to look through the keyhole].’⁵¹ The images possessed a startling directness and truth far beyond the coy eroticism or idealized fantasy of conventional late nineteenth-century nudes. Degas wondered how they would be received if he sent them to the Royal Academy. Sickert suggested they would not be received at all. ‘Je m’en doutais,’ Degas replied. ‘Ils n’admettant pas le cynisme dans l’art.’⁵²

The same sense of scrupulous detachment, if not cynicism, pervaded his pictures of popular performers: ballet dancers, circus acrobats, and café singers. He even described how he had employed the services of a professional draughtsman to help him with the perspective in his painting of the trapeze artist in La La at the Cirque Fernando.⁵³ The world of the popular stage was one that Degas loved, and he communicated his enthusiasm to Sickert, discoursing upon his favourite performers and singing snatches of music-hall ditties.⁵⁴ Treating Sickert as a fellow practitioner, he flattered him with a fusillade of technical tips: ‘On donne l’idée du vrai avec le faux’; ‘the art of painting [is] so to surround a patch of, say, Venetian red, that it appear[s] to be a patch of vermilion’.⁵⁵ They were, for the most part, ideas that Sickert could barely as yet comprehend, but he seized on them excitedly as coming from a true master – and a master who was interested in his education.

Degas was impressed and pleased by the ardour of his visitors. He gave them introductions not only to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, but also to several private collectors who held good examples of his work. Amongst the Sickerts’ artistic pilgrimages was one to the apartment off the Champs Élysées of Gustave Mulbacher – a successful coachbuilder who owned an impressive monochrome painting of a ballet rehearsal.⁵⁶ Ellen was captivated by the work; she thought Degas’ paintings ‘simply magnificent’, almost ‘the finest in the world’.⁵⁷

For Sickert they were a source of revelation and inspiration. Away from the holiday atmosphere of Dieppe, his friendship with Degas achieved a new intensity on the common ground of art. Degas’ studio became henceforth ‘the lighthouse’ of Sickert’s existence, and his friendship one of the great facts of his artistic life. From that time onwards, whenever he was in Paris Sickert had – as he put it with scant exaggeration – ‘the privilege of seeing constantly, on terms of affectionate intimacy, this truly great man’.⁵⁸

Walter and Ellen returned to London at the end of November lit up by the experience of being in Degas’ company and studying his work. Degas even followed up his many acts of kindness by sending Sickert ‘a beautiful letter’ that kept his presence alive in their minds.^* As Ellen told Blanche, Degas’ pictures ‘haunt our imaginations’. She admitted that they would probably ‘end by giving up the dull necessities of life & buying one of his pictures’.⁵⁹ For the moment, however, the dull necessities took precedence. The Sickerts had no home. The house they intended to lease, in a new development at Broadhurst Gardens, near Swiss Cottage, was not yet ready for them. As a result, they were obliged to take lodgings in Albany Street, close to Regent’s Park.⁶⁰

^* Annie Cobden’s husband, T. J. Sanderson, had amalgamated his name with that of his wife, to become T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. There seems to have been no suggestion that Sickert follow this course. Ellen, however, concerned to preserve the memory of her illustrious father, frequently – though not invariably – signed herself Mrs Cobden-Sickert.

^* Sickert was beginning to appreciate the difficulties of working on a large scale directly from the motif. He had attempted to paint the Hôtel Royale on ‘a really large canvas’, setting up his easel on the hotel terrace. The size of the picture, however, had attracted the attention of all the passers-by, and he had soon drawn a considerable crowd. ‘And so,’ he concluded, ‘I burst into tears, and ran home.’ Violet Overton Fuller, ‘Letters to Florence Pash’, 36.

^* The praise seems to have been well merited. Oswald Adalbert devoted that summer to working in pastel. Some of the pictures he produced – according to his daughter’s estimate – ‘showed a remarkable revival of interest in a man of fifty-seven’. Blanche, too, remembered them as ‘ravissant’ (HMS, 130; JEB, MS ‘Walter Sickert’).

† ‘The role of the butterfly must be pretty tiring. Me, I prefer to be the old ox.’

^* ‘My dear Whistler, you behave like a man without talent,’ Degas declared of one of Whistler’s bouts of affectation. On the question of Whistler’s love of public controversy he remarked: ‘I find it quite possible to pass an arena’.

^* The real affection between Degas and the Sickerts was confirmed early in the New Year when, to oblige Walter, Degas – who was attending to family business in Naples – called on the Richmond family at nearby Posilippo. Dorothy Richmond he had, of course, met at Dieppe in the summer, when the ‘jeune Australienne’, as he called her, had figured in some of the comic tableaux photographed by Walter Barnes.