Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 14

Always remember the golden rule – in art nothing matters

so long as you are bold.

(Whistler, quoted by Mortimer Menpes)

Sickert had hurried back to London in time for the opening of the Society of British Artists’ 1885 winter exhibition. Whistler’s increasing influence within the society, and the presence of the sympathetic young painter Jacomb Hood on the hanging committee, had secured a good showing for Sickert’s work and he had three small coastal scenes on display. Other members of the Whistlerian ‘school’ were also well represented.¹ Menpes, as a member, was of course able to show by right. He had been joined within the ranks of the club by William Stott though another Whistlerian nominee, Harper Pennington, was not successful.² Although the records of the SBA are not complete there is no evidence to suggest that Sickert was put forward for membership at this time – or later. Both he and Menpes appeared in the catalogue with the epithet ‘pupil of Whistler’ appended after their names.³ Such a designation was common currency in French exhibition catalogues, but the description, if not inappropriate, had the air of an attempt to a fix a position that was already shifting.

The Whistlerian group within the SBA may have been relatively small, but its impact was apparent. As Sickert wrote to Blanche (who also had a picture on view), ‘Suffolk Street has this advantage, that forward work may be seen there on an ample background of the most backward there is.’⁴ More, young ‘forward’-thinking artists began to be drawn to the club. Sickert met several new Whistlerian enthusiasts, amongst them Théodore Roussel, ‘a very pleasant fellow’ whom Whistler had recently taken up.⁵ A Frenchman by birth, Roussel had become a ‘cockney by adoption’, settling in London in the mid 1870s, when he was almost thirty. His twin passions were for Chelsea and Whistler. He took to depicting the former in the style of the latter – painting nocturnes of the Chelsea embankment and making etchings of the shopfronts in Church Street.⁶ He was, Sickert told Blanche, ‘the most thorough going & orthodox Whistlerite I have ever met’, and as such was a welcome addition to ‘the Butterfly propaganda’.⁷ Trailing doggedly in Roussel’s wake was his hunchbacked apprentice – and ‘mildly “damned soul” in low-toned riverside views’ – Paul Maitland.⁸

Less slavishly indebted to the Master, but none the less admiring, was Philip Wilson Steer. An almost exact contemporary of Sickert’s, Steer had only quite recently returned from two years’ study in Paris at the thoroughly traditional École des Beaux-Arts. Although he had seen some Impressionist work during his French sojourn, it was Whistler who most impressed him. When he returned to London at the end of 1884, he took a studio in Chelsea and began experimenting in a Whistlerian vein.⁹ He also tried out several other artistic styles. The painting he sent to the SBA exhibition that winter – a small Arcadian panel of a female goatherd – owed rather more to Bastien-Lepage than to anyone else. It certainly had a French title – Le Soir – which may have almost been enough on its own to persuade Sickert to seek out its author.¹⁰

Sickert discovered an ally, a friend, and a foil. Even at twenty-five, Steer’s handsome, slightly bovine features proclaimed a staid and comfort-loving temperament. Forward looking and Francophile in his painting, in almost all other matters he was innately conservative and English. He disliked change almost as much as he disliked draughts. His pleasures were many if simple: tea, toast, cats, Chelsea Pottery figurines (‘the best bad taste’), and mild flirtations with young models. And he had enough private income to be able to indulge them. Placid, self-effacing, and instinctive, he was in many respects an opposite to the energetic, communicative, and intellectualizing Sickert. But opposites attract, and they formed an instant bond. It helped, too, that they made each other laugh.

Sickert’s excitement at these new contacts and opportunities was abruptly curtailed at the beginning of December when his father fell ill – after taking a chill while out sketching – and then ‘rather suddenly’ died.¹¹ It was a ‘great grief’, and an unexpected one.¹² Oswald Adalbert Sickert was only fifty-seven. Although by all the conventional standards he had failed to establish himself as an artist, Walter admired him greatly, both for his work and his judgement. ‘I have never’, he later claimed, ‘forgotten anything he said to me.’¹³ The great sadness was that he had not said more. Walter came to regret all the subjects – especially those relating to painting – they had never had a chance to discuss.¹⁴ Sickert already had a sense that he stood in the third generation of a line of painters. His father’s death sharpened that perception, and placed a new onus of responsibility upon him. He preserved amongst his most treasured possessions examples of his father’s – and his grandfather’s – work, and drew strength from their suggestions of a shared and continuous artistic tradition.¹⁵

Sickert’s immediate duty was to his mother, who was all but inconsolable and little able to attend to the demands of the moment. He moved back to Pembroke Gardens with Ellen in order to help with the funeral and other arrangements.^*16 Ellen got on well with her mother-in-law, but even she struggled to draw Mrs Sickert from the depths of her grief. That feat was eventually accomplished by the unlikely figure of Oscar Wilde. He insisted upon seeing Mrs Sickert and gently coaxed her into talking of her husband and her loss. As Helena recalled, ‘He stayed a long while, and before he went I heard my mother laughing.’¹⁷ After she had rallied, Mrs Sickert began to settle into the role of matriarch. Controlling the family finances, she kept her children close about her. Robert and Bernhard, though in their early twenties and struggling away at uncongenial clerical jobs, both continued to live at home. Helena, who had been up at Girton College, Cambridge, studying Moral Sciences (the fees being paid by her godmother), ‘found it impossible’ to leave her grieving mother. Oswald Valentine and Leonard were still at school.¹⁸

Walter, for all his real filial affection, was careful to preserve a measure of independence and distance. As the eldest male – and the most powerful personality – he assumed a position of some command. One of his first acts was to persuade his mother that the feckless Bernhard was ‘a painter and nothing but a painter’ and should be spared the trials of conventional employment.¹⁹ He had had a picture accepted that winter at the SBA, and Sickert had drawn him into the circle of Whistlerites. He remained, however, very much a younger brother: it was understood that he should sign his works in full, while Walter could use their surname unadorned, on the grounds – as Walter explained to him – that ‘if we had been girls, I should have been Miss Sickert [as the eldest], but you would have been Miss Bernhard Sickert’.²⁰

Walter and Ellen finally moved into their new home at 54 Broad-hurst Gardens just before Christmas 1885; their first batch of headed writing paper had black mourning-borders. The house – part of a development of small-scale, four-storey, semi-detached dwellings – was in the fashionable aesthetic style, its red-brick façade broken by white-framed windows, its silhouette dominated by a steeply pointed gable end into which a balustraded picture window had been set. The developer had clearly been seeking to attract an artistic clientele for there was a ‘good studio’ at the top of the house, connected to the ground floor by a ‘speaking tube’.²¹ Sickert soon made himself at home in this ‘large, airy upper chamber’.²² He installed an etching bench and a small press, and gathered about him the paraphernalia of painting, as well as various studio ‘comforts’ given to him by his family: a rug, a footstool, a slop-pail, and a can. There was also ‘a comfortable settee’ upon which he could retire to think or read.²³

The one misfortune of the move was that the new plasterwork had reacted strangely with the sky-blue distemper they had chosen for the walls of the three principal rooms – turning the colour to a ‘cold mauve’. The effect, Ellen noted, was ‘painful as the painted woodwork is the right blue-green’, and nothing could be done to correct it until the spring.²⁴ Such was the horror of the colour combination that, even before they were properly settled, they were thinking of moving. There was talk of building a smaller house ‘quite to our satisfaction’ close by.²⁵

Married life inevitably drew Sickert away from Whistler’s immediate ambit. Swiss Cottage was not close to Chelsea, and the business of furnishing a house was a time-consuming one.²⁶ There were new interests, new connections, and new commitments to accommodate. Ellen had a wide circle of friends, and her sisters came to live close by.²⁷ The whole world of the Cobdenites – old allies of Ellen’s father – was ready to welcome the happy couple and include Walter in the circle. He now found himself dining at political tables.²⁸ He was a regular guest of Tom Potter, the fat and good-natured MP for Rochdale, whom Gladstone described as the ‘depository of Cobden’s traditions’,²⁹ and he saw something of the ever more politically inclined William Morris at Kelmscott House. Having formed no particular political views of his own, Sickert was happy to adopt Ellen’s hereditary loyalties. He got on well with her father’s old cronies, though he enjoyed vexing William Morris’s handcraft sensibilities by wearing a ready-made tie in the worst possible taste whenever he and Ellen visited Hammersmith.³⁰

Sickert seems to have been able to flourish in almost any company. Marriage to Ellen opened up new social opportunities for him; but he had already learnt society’s ways, and though he was attracted by its rewards he never succumbed to its ethos. He enjoyed flouting its conventions even as he embraced them.^* His detachment remained secure. He learnt to play the man of the world, adding to the remarkable social confidence and charm he possessed, even as a boy, an almost princely courtesy. But, as one observer noted, in all his dealings with society there lurked beneath the surface an ‘undefinable and evasive mockery’.³¹ It was the mockery of the ‘artist’, but also the mockery of a second-generation bastard with a foreign name.

Despite all distractions, Whistler remained the central focus of Sickert’s life, and Ellen adopted it too. Indeed 54 Broadhurst Gardens, in its decor and style, was conceived as something of an hommage to the Master. Ellen even referred to it jokingly as ‘our Whistler House’.³² They owned Whistler’s picture A White Note; the green-and-white wardrobe painted by Whistler was installed; and almost the Sickerts’ first act after their marriage was to commission portraits of themselves from Whistler at 100 guineas apiece.^† Sickert insisted on regarding this as a very favourable rate – ‘practically a fantastic present’.³³ Ellen worked hard to win Whistler’s trust. She gained it – along with his gratitude – when she deployed her influence to prevent Harry Quilter – the hostile art critic of The Times and new owner of the White House – from receiving a testimonial from her friend John Morley.³⁴ Whistler responded readily to such overtures.

It was certainly Whistler’s influence that secured Sickert a small one-man show at Dowdeswell’s Gallery during the dead season of January – a gathering of about twenty ‘little panels’, mostly of Dieppe.³⁵ In the catalogue, Sickert was again captioned as the ‘pupil of Whistler’; the critics thought he still had lessons to absorb. ‘In what our [French] neighbours call facture,’ wrote the Illustrated London News’ reviewer,

Mr Sickert has certainly caught something of his master’s trick; but in the inner perception of the ‘things unseen’, which Mr Whistler led us often to feel were lurking behind his misty foregrounds, the pupil has still much to learn. If his aim has been to catch fleeting impressions and to transfer them at once to his canvases for subsequent use and study, there is no reason to find fault with the delicacy of his perception; but it is rather a misnomer to call such works pictures, or to attempt to pass them as the result of serious application. For the most part, the colouring is flat and opaque, and in nearly every case far too imitative of his master’s ‘symphonies’ and ‘arrangements’.^*36

The confusion between the sketch and the painting was one of the standard criticisms of Impressionist art. Sickert would have expected it. But he does seem to have resolved – in the wake of the Dowdeswell show – to work on a slightly larger scale. For the future, he decided not to send ‘such small things’ to the Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy.³⁷

A hint of promise was noted by the reviewer in the single-figure picture Olive; it was praised as showing ‘that Mr. Sickert, when left to think for himself, can produce satisfactory work, and contains the germ of better things’.³⁸ But even in his figure pictures, though the critic may not have recognized it, Sickert’s approach seems to have been directed closely by Whistler’s example. Menpes recalled receiving a telegraphed summons to Broadhurst Gardens portending an important discovery. He and Sickert had noted Whistler’s recently adopted ‘system’ of painting with ready-mixed and ready-diluted colours such as ‘floor tone’, ‘flesh tone’, and ‘blue sky tone’, which he kept always on hand. Sickert had at once seized upon the idea – and carried it further. Menpes, as he made his way up to the attic studio, could hear an ominous ‘dripping sound’. He found Sickert working from a model, surrounded by ‘about fifty milk cans’, each filled with a different tone: ‘lip tone, eye tone etc.’. The paint was so liquid that, as he tried to get it from the pot on to the canvas, it dripped all over the floor. And the operation had to be undertaken at such speed that it could hardly be accurate: most of the eye tone ‘went on to the background’. ‘I felt that the eye should be in the face,’ Menpes remembered, ‘but still it was an eye, and it was art, and in art – according to the Whistlerites’ dictum – nothing mattered as long as you were reckless and had your tones.’³⁹

It was at about this time that the small but growing inner circle of Whistler ‘followers’ formalized themselves into a club. They decided to hire a room where they might meet of an evening ‘for the discussion of art’. Gathered at Menpes’ house in Fulham one evening, the seven members consulted a map of London, marking their homes on it with red dots, and then estimating the most convenient central location for their meeting place. Baker Street was fixed upon and a little room was taken there for six shillings a week. Beyond Menpes and Sickert the exact membership of the group is unknown, but the original line-up almost certainly included Sidney Starr, Harper Pennington, and Alberto Ludovici Jr. Théodore Roussel was an early addition.⁴⁰ Other possible members were Bernhard Sickert, William Stott, Jacomb Hood, and Philip Wilson Steer. The claims of such female followers as Maud Franklin and Elizabeth Armstrong seem to have been ignored.^* Adopting what they considered to be a Whistlerian maxim – ‘Nature never makes a mistake in matching her tones’ – the group decorated their room as a ‘harmony’ of sea and sky with sky-blue distemper walls and a sea-green distemper ceiling, whilst the woodwork was painted ‘the tone of the Dover cliffs’. Although the scheme was, from a naturalistic point of view, upside down, it was, of course, another Whistlerian axiom that nature was just as beautiful either way up. Headed notepaper was ordered, stamped with a symbolic motif – ‘a steam engine advancing, with a red-light displayed, – a warning signal to the Philistines that the reformers were on their track’.⁴¹

In their earnest discussions around the inadequate paraffin stove, in their quest for that ‘great discovery in the matter of method, or of pigment, or of manipulation’ that would ‘revolutionise all the old canons of art’, Whistler remained their guiding light. Théodore Roussel brought a touch of scientific rigour to their deliberations. Of a technical bent, he had designed what he called (in his heavily accented English) a ‘tone detector-r-r’ – an optical device for matching the tones of nature. He also worked out a scheme for mixing perfectly pure pigments from ground-up crystals.⁴² But, for all the reverence accorded to Whistler, the parallel attractions of Degas were not to be ignored. Sickert, on his return from Paris, enthused his confrères with descriptions of the work he had seen there. As he told Blanche, he only wished he could ‘bring the whole school over to Paris to make the Mulbacher and other pilgrimages’ – that they might examine Degas’ pictures at first hand.⁴³ Although the followers did not advertise to Whistler this new interest in Degas – or ‘Digars’, as Menpes referred to him – they considered the two artists as twin spirits, Impressionists both.^* They tried to combine the method of one with the subject matter of the other, producing not entirely satisfactory pictures of ‘low toned’ ballet girls.⁴⁴

Another alternative voice was provided by Charles Keene. Sickert had come to know him well. He visited him at his studio in the King’s Road, and invited him to Broadhurst Gardens.⁴⁵ They dined together at the Arts Club in Dover Street (it was Keene who put Sickert up for membership there in 1888),⁴⁶ and they talked of art. Keene impressed Sickert on many levels: in his practical attitude to his craft; in his patient humility (‘Think of that great man drawing all those bricks,’ Sickert remarked of Keene’s depiction of a garden wall); in his artistic engagement with the world around him.⁴⁷ There were useful tips to be gleaned. Sickert observed how Keene worked always on a relatively small scale.⁴⁸ He relished his diatribe against the use of nude models in art schools on the ground that ‘the world being filled with clothed persons, modern painters will have more need to learn how to paint them than to paint nudes’.⁴⁹ He noted, too, how Keene used himself as his own clothed model, keeping a variety of costumes hanging on pegs in his studio for the purpose.⁵⁰

In most things Keene offered a rather different perspective to Whistler. There was no pretension about him or his art: he had achieved his greatness ‘doing drawings for a threepenny comic paper to make his living’ – and that was what he went on doing.⁵¹ His view of Whistler, though generally admiring, was not overburdened with reverence. He surprised Sickert, and set him thinking, by a preference for Whistler’s paintings over his etchings.⁵² After revealing an heretical admiration for the work of the Berlin realist Adolph Menzel, he confided ‘with one of his monumental and comprehensive winks, “Ye know, I like bad pictures. But don’t tell Jimmy.”’⁵³

Though Keene, like Degas, might offer the first hint of an alternative vision, for the time being it remained only a hint. Sickert had little difficulty in reconciling all attractive ideas with those of Whistler. The essential commitment to Whistler’s cause and Whistler’s interests remained constant. He did a drawing of a Whistler painting for reproduction in the Pall Mall Budget, and fired off a letter to the Daily News after it had had the temerity to suggest that England lacked a painter who could depict English snow.⁵⁴ He even undertook to sort out a dispute that had arisen between Whistler and the Fine Art Society over a missing pair of Venice etchings.⁵⁵ His attendance at Whistler’s studio may have slackened, but it did not cease. Beatrice Godwin, who had recently separated from her husband, was sitting to Whistler (who greatly admired her), and Sickert made an etching of her in the same pose.⁵⁶ He also sat for his own portrait.⁵⁷

Whistler’s power base within the Society of British Artists continued to expand. He was active in putting forward his supporters for membership – Starr was elected in the spring of 1886 – but Sickert, as a non-member, remained vulnerable to the vagaries of the picture selection process. The conservative element within the SBA was still formidable and, as Sickert explained to Blanche, while the Whistlerites had been lucky to have Jacomb Hood on the hanging committee, ‘next time it may be three idiots’.⁵⁸ And perhaps that was how it turned out. Sickert was not represented in the society’s April exhibition. The rebuff would have been felt the more keenly because Starr’s painting – of Paddington station – was the hit of the show.⁵⁹ Some hope for the future was, however, given when Whistler was elected President of the SBA at the beginning of June, provoking what Mrs Sickert described as ‘much glory among the faithful pupils & adherents’.⁶⁰

Sickert did not stay to revel in the glory for long. He went to Paris for a few days: the Salon had recently opened and so, more importantly, had the eighth – and final – Impressionist Exhibition, which included several new works by Degas.⁶¹ His and Ellen’s resolve to buy a Degas picture had strengthened, and it was probably on this trip that Sickert arranged the purchase of the pastel La Danseuse Verte. It came from the private collection of Charles Ephrussi, though the sale was handled by a dealer. Sickert paid a little over 2000 francs (about £80) for the picture.⁶² He also noted a second work, a pastel lithograph, at the dealer Closet’s: ‘A singer with two white gloves & many globes of light & a green wooden thing behind & fireworks in the sky & two women’s heads in the audience.’⁶³ Back in London, he and Ellen decided that they should buy this picture as well. The price was only £16. Ellen agreed to sell some stocks to pay for it, but the sum was required quickly and Sickert wrote to Whistler pleading for the return of some of the money they had paid him on account for their portraits. Tactfully, he suggested it was needed for living expenses.⁶⁴ Blanche was then commissioned to buy the picture – if possible at a discount.⁶⁵ Displaying his characteristic helpfulness and efficiency, Blanche delivered the picture in person when he came to London at the end of the month (Sickert repaid the kindness by presenting his friend with a small painting of his own).⁶⁶ Blanche was charmed by the Sickerts’ new home: a ‘maison délicieuse … pleine de jolies choses’ (the cold mauve walls had been repainted)⁶⁷ and was amazed to discover the Danseuse Verte, which he had known well chez Ephrussi, now on their wall. He assumed that Sickert must have ‘pas mal d’argent’ to be making such acquisitions.⁶⁸

The assumption, as Blanche soon came to realize, was quite false. Sickert had no money. If he had possessed any he would certainly have been extravagant with it. In its absence he was extravagant with his wife’s. Throughout the first flush of home-making Ellen seems to have encouraged such expenditure. The house in Broadhurst Gardens was by no means cheap: at just under £80 a year, the rent and rates were not inconsiderable – quite apart from the cost of decking the walls with works by Degas and Whistler.⁶⁹ It was only with time that Ellen came to recognize her husband’s complete – almost wilful – recklessness in money matters. ‘Giving money to Walter’, she once remarked, ‘is like giving it to a child to light a fire with.’⁷⁰ With no income of his own, and no sales from his pictures, he was almost entirely dependent upon her. She gave him an allowance, but sought to control his excesses by keeping it small.⁷¹ To evade such restrictions he ran up debts and borrowed occasional small sums from Whistler, his mother, and his brothers.⁷² Sickert disbursed what he had with a programmatic recklessness. ‘I am so convinced’, he told one friend, ‘that the way to have, is to spend, and that lavish generosity pays, as well as being delightful. The thing is to give, give, give. You always get back more than you give.’⁷³

The summer of 1886 was hot. By mid July Ellen had begun to wilt, and Walter’s studio under the roof at Broadhurst Gardens had become ‘like an oven’. For relief, they fled to the glaciers of Switzerland, stopping to admire some ‘wonderful’ Holbeins at Basle. Ellen loved Alpine air and Alpine scenery; Walter was less convinced. ‘I suppose it is very healthy,’ he told Blanche, ‘but I prefer Marylebone for a holiday.’ He fell ill after taking a dip in the Rhine, and altogether could not wait to be back in London ‘with the green danseuse who is better than all the scenery of Switzerland’. He filled the long hours at Pontresina, the little resort town where they were staying, by making a closely worked etching of a young girl standing in the gloom of a dark kitchen – one of several ‘Rembrandt interiors’ he had noted.⁷⁴ They returned to England at the end of September via Munich and Dresden, where – to judge from the series of etchings that Walter produced – they had a rather jollier and more active time in crowded cafés and at the Oktoberfest.⁷⁵

Back in London, Sickert threw himself into the exhibition season with new vigour. Although Whistler’s presidency prompted a radical overhaul of the SBA’s exhibiting policy (the Suffolk Street galleries were refurbished to Whistler’s designs, and the number of works on show was drastically reduced), total control was impossible. The society, in Sickert’s words, remained ‘half-savage’. There could be no guarantee that work by Whistler’s followers would be accepted. But for the efforts of Menpes and Stott, who were acting as ‘supervisors’, Sickert’s picture would have been rejected by a ‘stodgy’ hanging committee.⁷⁶

The painting, Rehearsal: The End of the Act, marked Sickert’s promised break from small-scale Whistlerian sketches. It was almost two foot square and depicted a woman slumped on a padded sofa. The well-informed would, nevertheless, perhaps still have recognized a Whistlerian debt. The model was Helen Lenoir of the D’Oyly Carte Company. Her exhausted pose might be read as the result of her labours in producing the Ten o’Clock Lecture. To reinforce the connection, Sickert’s earlier print of Miss Lenoir – The Acting Manager – was also on view, with several other works, at the Society of Painter-Etchers. Looking beyond the established outlets, Sickert also sent a figure study titled Ethel to the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, a staid old society that numbered several of his father’s friends amongst its members.⁷⁷

His busy round of active self-advertisement was unexpectedly rewarded when he received an invitation to exhibit in the New Year with Les XX, a recently formed avant-garde Belgian art association that had instituted an annual salon in Brussels. At first Sickert suspected Blanche’s beneficent influence was behind this coup, being unable to imagine that his own ‘unassisted fame could have led any Society, however perspicacious, to single out the genius that [was] modestly hidden in the suburb of Hampstead’.⁷⁸ But that, it seems, is almost what had happened. Blanche was not involved. The Belgian painter Willy Finch had noticed Sickert’s work on a visit to England, and noticed too, no doubt, its debt to Whistler, of whom he was a great admirer. Acting as a talent scout, Finch had written enthusiastically to Octave Maus, the secretary of Les XX, praising the pictures as ‘très raffinées comme art’;⁷⁹ and Maus had duly sent an invitation. Sickert swelled with pride at this ‘marque de la plus haute distinction’, as he termed it in his fulsome letter of acceptance. He at once began work on a very large canvas some six foot square.⁸⁰

Sickert’s determined application was impressive, and his development, though perhaps less accelerated than Menpes’ or Starr’s, was certainly discernible to close observers. Whistler, who was not given to praising, noted it. That summer, while going round the Royal Academy show, he had impressed the critic Malcolm Salaman with a stray remark in front of a canvas by the young James Lavery. ‘Yes – very nice, don’t you know?’ he had said in his curiously effective manner. ‘But well, you know of all the young men, I should say, the one who will go furthest is Walter Sickert.’⁸¹ George Moore recounted a similar exchange.^* And if Moore knew a thing he never wasted any time in passing it on. Sickert would have been aware both of his progress and of how much was expected of him.

Whistler’s admiration was, however, tempered by a keen sense of insecurity. Sickert’s extended holiday abroad, his decision to send to the Institute, the other demands upon his life, all vexed the ever touchy Master. Whistler wrote a peevish note to his pupil, complaining that he and his affairs were being neglected. Sickert sprang forward with assurances of continued loyalty and affection. ‘My dear Jimmy, You have written to me in a fit of the blues. Indifference you know perfectly well I have never shown towards anything that concerned you, dating back to years before I even knew you, and independence is a quality the merit of which I have never heard you throw a doubt upon – except indeed in the case of Switzerland and there I went for health & not for scenery.’ As to the ‘matter of the Institute’, Sickert explained that it had its ‘pleasant side’ for Whistler, showing that ‘now you have taught me to walk I am not crying to be carried’. Besides, it was a necessity for Sickert to ‘peddle’ his work where and how he could: ‘Painting must be for me a profession & not a pastime, or else I must give it up & take to something practical.’⁸² Ellen added her voice to these protestations. She promised to come and pose again for her portrait, and to bring Walter with her – so that he could ‘during the sittings attend to any affairs on which he can be useful to you’.⁸³

Sickert’s reference to painting as his ‘profession’ was an optimistic statement of intent, rather than of fact. As yet his ‘profession’ had yielded few tangible rewards. His pictures did not sell. If he was gaining a reputation it was only amongst the tiny coterie of Whistler’s followers. He made presents of his paintings to most of the members of the school – to Menpes, Starr, Roussel, and Elizabeth Armstrong – and borrowed back several of these small panels to send in to Les XX. But his new large painting was not finished in time. He sent instead the picture of Miss Lenoir on her sofa, which had just been returned from the SBA show.⁸⁴

The exhibition began in February 1887. Sickert could not travel to Brussels for the opening, but the press reports made clear the challenging nature of the event. Amongst the vague Symbolist imaginings and Impressionist morsels on view, the painting that attracted the greatest attention was Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The picture confirmed a development hinted at in the last Impressionist exhibition. Its novel approach to colour – dividing its constituent hues into tiny dots – had been dubbed ‘Neo-Impressionism’ by the young French critic Félix Fénéon, and already other artists were taking it up. Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac were both represented in the show with ‘Neo-Impressionist’ works, while the Belgian artists Willie Finch and Théo van Rysselberghe were also beginning to experiment with the technique. Against such scintillating novelty Sickert’s contributions appeared both literally and figuratively insubstantial. The reviewer for L’Indépendence Belge remarked that although one of his paintings was called Trois Nuages, the title would have been apt for almost any of them: ‘tant ils sont tous nuageux’.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, to be in the exhibition at all was an achievement and a thrill.⁸⁶

If Menpes is to be believed, the innovative work on view in Brussels provoked Sickert and the other members of the Baker Street band to emulation. They became, for a while, ‘prismatic’ and began to experiment with painting ‘in spots and dots’.⁸⁷ For Sickert, however, the main effect of his exposure to the swift current of the Continental avant-garde was upon his subject matter.

^* Oswald Adalbert Sickert was buried at Brompton Cemetry. His personal estate, which he left entirely to his wife, was valued at just £295. 10s. 11d.

^* His family used to despair at some his ‘outrageous’ ploys, ‘such as turning up at society functions in all kinds of odd clothes’: one his favourite outfits was a ‘country squire’ (reminiscences of a servant of the Sickert family during the 1880s, quoted in LB, II, 14).

† Sickert never hung the walls of his homes with his own work. To have done so would have seemed to him ‘a form of incest’ (RE, 287).

^* Sickert’s command of the superficial aspects of Whistler’s style could, it seems, deceive some people. In later years, Sickert liked to tell an anecdote of how he had been entrusted to deliver a small Whistler panel to a customer in Dieppe. Crossing over to France on the ferry, the picture had been torn from his grasp by a gust of wind and blown overboard. Undeterred, on arrival at Dieppe, he had assembled some materials and painted his own version of the scene, which he then delivered to the unsuspecting – and completely satisfied – customer. Sickert told this rather fanciful story to Donald Ball in the late 1930s, when Ball was a student at the Thanet School of Art.

^* A study of the artists’ addresses in 1885/6 provides some clues, with Menpes, Roussel, and Steer living in Chelsea, Bernhard Sickert in Kensington, Walter Sickert in Swiss Cottage, Starr in Fitzroy Street, and Ludovici in Camden Town. The date of the foundation of the club is conjectural; but, given its Baker Street location, it is difficult to suppose that it occurred before the Sickerts’ move to Broadhurst Gardens.

^* The correct pronunciation of Degas’ name became one of Sickert’s great – and abiding – causes. ‘Day-gas, day-gas, why’, he lamented, ‘do the English always say Day-gas.’ He never tired of pointing out that Gas was a town in France from which Degas’ ancestors had come, and that the name had originally been spelled De Gas, making this – and the pronunciation – clear (WS, ‘John Everett Millais’, Fortnightly Review, June 1929).

^* ‘One day walking with [Whistler] I heard the Master mutter – at first it was but a mutter, but gradually the mutter grew more distinct, and I heard him say, “Well, you know, talking of Walter … I don’t mean that Walter will ever do as much as Manet, but if we are to consider the relations of Art and Nature, and of English painting to those red things which –” The rest of the sentence I never heard, it was lost in guffaws. By red things the Master meant portraits of officers in uniform, but this by the way. What immediately concerns us is that the Master looked upon Walter Sickert as a great painter.’ Saturday Review (23 June 1906), 784.