Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 15

‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’

(Music-hall song)

Sickert was in search of a new and personal motif. His little seascapes and townscapes proclaimed a too obvious Whistlerian debt. The ballet, the racecourse, and the bathroom belonged to Degas. And although France offered other possibilities, Degas was insistent that English artists should search for English sources of inspiration.¹ Sickert seems to have considered some conventional options. One friend who met him at this time recalled that he was working away at a series of cathedrals.² But the attractions of ecclesiastical architecture did not long engage him. He turned instead to the more daring possibilities of the modern music hall. This was in effect a transposition to a London setting of one of Degas’ chosen subjects – the café chantant (as depicted in the Sickerts’ Mlle Bécat aux Ambassadeurs). Although the Victorian music hall might now seem the essence of quaintness, in the 1880s it was something quite different: modern, metropolitan, vulgar, artificial, and daring. It was also distinctly British. Since his first meeting with Degas, Sickert had been toying with theatrical subjects. Besides the ‘low toned ballet girls’ of the previous year, he had made etchings of the circus, of Punch and Judy shows, and even of the occasional music-hall audience. But it was only now that he began to investigate the subject with real concentration, considering it as a motif for painting.³

It was fertile ground. The music halls were a phenomenon of the age. Scores of them were dotted across London and its suburbs. They had – in their short life – evolved from glorified pub theatres to become institutions in their own right. But they were still dominated by alcohol. The bar was always open and a ticket usually included the price of at least one drink. Shows lasted all evening, from eight till midnight, and the audience – gathered at tables close to the stage, settled in red-plush chairs, or crammed onto benches in the gallery – were part of the show. Spectators heckled the acts, abused each other, and joined in with the choruses, while a chairman kept order and announced the succession of ‘turns’. Although some of the smart new halls offered ‘ballet’ and ingenious novelty acts, on the popular fringe song and dance still held sway, offering a diet of mawkish sentiment, broad humour, rampant jingoism, and sexual allusion. They were themes, and treatments, that appealed to the vast mass of London’s working class; and increasingly they appealed to others too. Although the guardians of public morality regarded the halls with horror, as sinks of debauchery and arenas of vice, a few bohemian spirits relished their heady atmosphere. Sickert was a pioneer in the field, but he was not alone. George Moore also had an enthusiasm for the halls, as did Steer and Ludovici. ‘What delightful unanimity of soul,’ Moore wrote, ‘what community of wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other’s presence; in a word there was life.’⁴ Sickert found a rich pictorial drama in the low tones of the auditorium, the garish light of the stage, and in the fleeting arrangements of the performers. But it appealed too because it was both daring and previously untapped. Whistler had never attempted to paint it, and nor had anyone else. It was a chance to stake a claim on something new – and something that was likely to shock.

Once Sickert began work on this new theme, he quickly came to realize that the methods and techniques he had learnt from Whistler provided almost no clue of how to proceed. A pochade box was useless: sitting in the semi-darkness of a music hall unable to see his colours or move his elbows, he could not paint from life. Painting the whole scene from memory – as Whistler did with his nocturnes – was likewise impossible. He could study and observe – but only so much. Compared to a Thames-side warehouse, the auditorium of a London music hall was both too complex and too fugitive to be learnt in full. So he turned instead to the example of Degas. He started to work from snatches of repeatedly ‘observed and remembered’ movement, from drawings, and from notes.⁵ He returned night after night to the same seat in the same music hall to study his scene: to memorize and set down a single significant move or gesture, to note the divisions of light and shade, the subtle grades of tone, and the rich vestiges of colour. It was as a detached, unobserved member of an excited audience that Sickert evolved his rare power of objective vision – ‘the one thing’, as he later described it, ‘in all my experience that I cling to … my coolness and leisurely exhilarated contemplation’.⁶ He proliferated tiny drawings, some done in little, lined, laundry books, others on postcards.⁷ He captioned them with colour notes, or – more often – with the words of a song or a snatch of dialogue: an aural aidemémoire. The composition of the pictures was mapped out, the elements marshalled, and the paint applied, not on site but back in the studio. In most of his early experiments he borrowed from Degas the conventions of Mlle Bécat aux Ambassadeurs – viewing a single footlit artiste over a ragged silhouette of foreground figures.

At the 1887 spring exhibition of the SBA, Sickert unveiled his first music-hall painting – Le Mammoth Comique. The picture – a small canvas of an open-mouthed, evening-suited singer standing against a stage backdrop with the orchestra pit in the foreground – provoked surprisingly little comment. It was admired as being ‘clever’ by both the critic from the Daily Telegraph and by Mrs Sickert;⁸ but the debt to Degas was not remarked. Whistler’s views on the work are unknown.⁹ The President had other things to engage his attention that season. The Prince and Princess of Wales visited the exhibition.^* There were hopes that the society would be given a Royal Charter and even that the President might receive a knighthood. (The former came to pass, the latter did not.) Another visitor was Claude Monet, who had come over to stay with Whistler and promised to send work to the next exhibition. Amongst these excitements, Sickert’s little music-hall scene was a minor distraction.

At the beginning of June, Sickert – together with Ellen – crossed to the Netherlands to stay at the seaside resort of Scheveningen.¹⁰ The excursion may have been, in part, an act of piety, for Whistler had painted and etched there often. Sickert, too, made numerous small etchings of the beach and its distinctive hooded wicker chairs – or windstolen – as well as some rather brighter and less obviously Whistlerian paintings. Yet even when working in his master’s idiom, Sickert’s own voice was becoming gradually more apparent. The etchings that he showed that November at the Society of Painter-Etchers – where, greatly to Ellen’s delight, he had been elected a fellow – were praised for their ‘individuality’ and accomplishment.¹¹

‘Individuality’ was not something that Whistler particularly encouraged amongst his pupils. He seems to have ignored Sickert’s achievements, and engaged him instead in his own printmaking activities. Under the guidance of his printer friend Thomas Way, Whistler was experimenting with lithography after a break of several years,¹² and Sickert was invited to try his hand at the medium.¹³ Rather less flatteringly, he was also charged with carrying the Master’s weighty lithographic stone when they set out together of an evening, ‘in case inspiration should come during or after dinner’. As a friend recorded, ‘at the Café Royal or elsewhere the waiter was enjoined to place an extra table for the stone’, but more often than not it was still untouched when Sickert would have to carry it away at the end of the night’s entertainment.¹⁴

Sickert did not seek to build on the achievement of Le Mammoth Comique at the winter exhibition of the now ‘Royal’ Society of British Artists.¹⁵ He was keeping his powder dry, for all was not well at Suffolk Street. Although Whistler’s achievement of royal patronage had won the universal approbation of the SBA membership, on most other fronts he was assailed by complaints. Seeking to bring matters to a head, he put forward a motion calling for members to resign their attachments to all other societies, including even the Royal Academy. This was not a popular move. Many members exhibited and sold pictures with other variously distinguished national and local societies. They saw nothing to gain from complete exclusivity and much to lose. Rather than provoking the conservative element to leave the club, as he had hoped, Whistler provoked them into rebellion. His motion was defeated, and a battle line was drawn. A group of members began to campaign for the President’s removal; and although Whistler sought to bolster his position by drafting more supporters into the ranks of the society (Théodore Roussel and Waldo Story both became members in 1887), the vulnerability of his position became increasingly apparent.

It was against this gathering crisis that Sickert began to look beyond the confines of Suffolk Street. The RSBA was, he realized, ‘a house divided against itself’ and ‘the split’ would come ‘sooner or later’.¹⁶ It was as well to be prepared. As a non-member he relied on the Whistlerian control of the selection process to secure a showing for his pictures. If Whistler were ousted there could be no guarantee that his work would continue to be accepted, and every possibility that it would not.

Sickert needed to find a new forum for his work. Steer and several other of Sickert’s Baker Street confrères had recently exhibited with a society called the New English Art Club, and their example encouraged him to look in this direction.¹⁷ The club had been established only the previous year, in 1886, by a group of artists, the majority of whom had received some training in the Paris studios (indeed one suggested name for the club had been ‘The Society of Anglo-French Painters’).¹⁸ The original members were ‘a mixed crew’ and the influence that France exerted over the work took various forms – and existed at various strengths.¹⁹ John Singer Sargent was a founder member, but perhaps the dominant artistic strain was the large-scale plein-airism derived from Bastien-Lepage: scenes of a slightly sentimentalized English rural realism done in ‘what [was] known as French technique’.²⁰ This school was represented by George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes, Henry la Thangue, Henry Scott Tuke, and numerous lesser lights.

Besides the Baker Street group, there were a few other members of the new body who professed an interest in the work of the French Impressionists, even if their own pictures tended to show only the faintest traces of actual influence. It was one of these, Fred Brown, who had invited Steer to exhibit with the club, having been impressed by the quasi-idyllic painting of a goat girl exhibited at the SBA in 1885.²¹ Brown, then in his mid thirties, had been teaching at the Westminster School of Art since 1877, offering night classes in drawing and painting to working men and part-time students. He was an inspired and inspiring teacher, and had established a reputation for the clarity of his approach. It was work that kept him in touch with the rising generation of artists – as well as giving him a taste for administrative organization. He emerged as one of the guiding spirits of the new club and drew up its novel, and thoroughly democratic, constitution: there was no president, only an honorary secretary; and exhibitors had the same voting rights as members.²²

As in the early days of most institutions, there was some jockeying for influence and control. Brown was anxious to secure his own circle of support within the club – hence his invitation to Steer to show at the club’s inaugural exhibition in the spring of 1886, and again in 1887.²³ And he was delighted to meet a potential new recruit in Sickert, who, in turn, was no less delighted to meet Brown. He grasped at once the possibilities of the situation: here was a young, unformed institution that might serve as a home for himself and his confrères. He infected Brown with something of this vision, and plans were soon afoot to seize ‘a greater, and, if possible, a dominating influence’ in the running of the club.²⁴ Sickert was able to marshal the other members of the Whistlerian faction: Starr, Menpes, and Francis James all agreed to show with the NEAC in future, as did Sickert’s brother Bernhard, and Paul Maitland.²⁵ The group’s position was further enhanced when the club’s secretary retired at the end of the year and was replaced by the 34-year-old Francis Bate. Bate was both an admirer of Whistler and a friend of Brown’s.²⁶ He joined the frequent meetings, in which Sickert took the lead, that were taking place to discuss the strategy of the planned coup. They were held in Sickert’s studio at Broadhurst Gardens, and, as Brown recalled, ‘with Sickert as host, our little conspiracies were not very sombre affairs … His gaiety was contagious, his manner charming, his wit bubbling.’²⁷ Brown, despite his seniority, found himself swept along by his young companions. Sickert later described him as having been ‘caught up by our movement as by a cow catcher on a train’.²⁸

In the first instance, Sickert seems to have viewed the infiltration of the NEAC as part of the grand Whistlerian project. He tried at every juncture to include his master in his developing plans for the club. But it was a difficult matter to achieve. Whistler, despite his problems, was still committed at Suffolk Street, and he could not very well become a member of a new body after his recent demands for exclusive loyalty to the RSBA. Nevertheless, he did consent to send a print to the NEAC’s show in the spring of 1888, and to allow Sickert to show Ellen’s canvas, A White Note.²⁹ (Sickert further reinforced the connection by exhibiting a small panel of ‘The Vale’, which cognoscenti would have recognized as Whistler’s home.) But Sickert’s horizons were no longer bounded by Chelsea. His own music-hall works took off from the example of Degas, while Steer, in a series of sun-drenched depictions of young girls at the seaside, was experimenting with ever more brilliant colours and ever more broken brushwork, inspired by a study of Monet’s technique. Sickert sought to foster these French ties and enhance the club’s prestige. Following Whistler’s own example in wooing Monet, he approached Degas. There were hopes that the great man might even be persuaded to become a member of the club. At all events, he gave permission for Sickert to exhibit the Danseuse Verte.³⁰

Sickert showed his own commitment to the new venture by sending in his largest and most daring picture to date: a tall, thin music-hall scene, some five foot by three foot, depicting Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties – Second Turn of Katie Lawrence. He could be confident that it would be accepted, since he was on the selection committee.³¹ The machinations of Brown and Bate had packed the jury, and by acting in concert they were able to determine the character of the show. As one hostile critic later recalled, a ‘new spirit made itself felt’.³² In the hanging of the show the two places of honour, in the centre of the long walls of the Dudley Gallery, were given to Steer and Sickert. It was the first of many occasions on which they appeared as the twin pillars of New English Art. As tended to happen on such occasions, the critics displayed their open-mindedness by offering a few words of faint praise for one before damning the other. Steer was represented by A Summer’s Evening, a large canvas of three nude girls on a beach that combined his radical Monet-inspired brushwork with the more familiar comforts of an idyllic scene. Though some reviewers found its agglomeration of ‘red, blue and yellow spots’ an unpardonable ‘affectation’, more were upset by Sickert’s picture.³³

His depiction of Katie Lawrence was derided as resembling ‘a marionette’, ‘a temporarily galvanised lay-figure’, and ‘an impudent wooden doll … with hands down to her knees’ and her mouth ‘twisted under her left ear’.³⁴ One paper suggested that Miss Lawrence should sue the artist for defamation.³⁵ The absence of detail, the lack of ‘finish’, the want of ‘graceful composition’, and the vulgarity of the subject matter were all resoundingly condemned.³⁶ It was acknowledged that these unfortunate traits were programmatic – the ‘affected mannerisms’ of the ‘advanced Impressionists’.³⁷ Although to many English commentators Whistler remained the prime – if not the sole – ‘Impressionist’, knowledge of the French members of the school was slowly percolating into the critical consciousness. Following several recent showings of work by Monet, Steer’s broken-colour technique was recognized as being in the French artist’s manner. And the presence of the Danseuse Verte on the walls of the Dudley Gallery ensured that a firm connection was noted between the work of Sickert and Degas.³⁸

The critic from the Magazine of Art, in a grave attempt at reasonableness, suggested that the ‘whole movement’ of Impressionism was still very much ‘an experiment, and, for the present, [should] be estimated accordingly’.³⁹ Degas’ experiment, though accounted ‘horrible’ by many, received some words of grudging praise.⁴⁰ But it was generally agreed that Sickert’s effort was an abject failure, falling below the level of even ‘conventional mediocrity’. The Pall Mall Gazette found a kind word for the painting’s ‘excellent tone’ and The Star’s anonymous reviewer (perhaps George Bernard Shaw) praised the ‘excellently painted top-hat in the right hand corner’ of the composition.⁴¹ But that was the limit of critical approbation. The fact that Sickert, with an eye to notoriety rather than sales, was asking a staggering 500 guineas for the picture only increased the sense of outrage.⁴² Within a week of the exhibition’s opening Sickert found himself, according to one paper, ‘the best abused man in London – with perhaps the sole exception of Mr Balfour’.⁴³

It was a triumph of publicity – if nothing else. The furore focused attention on to the NEAC, and it placed Sickert at the very centre of the stage. The position was both new and exciting. He was acknowledged – albeit only in London art circles – as standing in the front rank of ‘the independent, and often eccentric’ young men ‘seeking to strike out a new line and throw off the trammels of tradition – and, some would add, of respect’.⁴⁴ His attention-grabbing display at the Dudley Gallery was made more pointed the following month when the four modest landscapes that he exhibited at the RSBA failed to draw any but the most cursory critical attention.^* It was to be his last association with the society for a decade. After surviving one vote of no-confidence, Whistler was finally ousted from the presidency at a packed general meeting on 4 June 1888. His followers resigned en masse. Sickert, who had never been a member, ceased to send pictures. As Whistler remarked, ‘the artists left and the British remained’.⁴⁵ For Sickert, the debacle confirmed his good sense in establishing a base at the NEAC. As he wrote to Blanche soon afterwards, affecting a tone of cool assurance, ‘Do send us again some work – the more important the better – to the New English Art Club. That will be the place I think for the young school in England. Faute de mieux.’⁴⁶

Inspired by the succès d’exécration of his Katie Lawrence picture, Sickert buried himself in his work that summer, spending many evenings drawing at Gatti’s and elsewhere.⁴⁷ The music hall became his all-but exclusive theme. Copies of Entr’acte littered his studio; photographs of star performers were affixed to his easel.⁴⁸ Ellen, with her keen admiration for Degas’ work, encouraged him in this direction. She would sometimes accompany him to the halls, and they would sup together afterwards at cheap and cheerful restaurants in Soho.⁴⁹ But when Sickert became caught up by a subject his appetite for work was all-consuming. He forgot everything else.⁵⁰ He would go out every night to study the aspects of his composition. He took to following his chosen artistes from hall to hall over the course of one evening so that he might have repeated opportunities of catching the fleeting details of some gesture or expression. It was a regime that inevitably drew him away from Ellen and the life of Broadhurst Gardens. He would return home in the early hours of the morning – after walking halfway across London – to find a sleeping house.⁵¹ He was not good at informing Ellen of his plans – indeed he was not good at making plans. He expected meals to be ready for him on the chance of his appearance, but the chance was often missed. Sometimes he would fail to turn up even when he and Ellen had guests to dinner, sending a last-minute telegram from a distant music hall to explain his absence.⁵²

He became friendly with the artistes whom he depicted: with the forthright Katie Lawrence and her unrelated namesake, Queenie; with Bessie Bellwood, the raucous, bright-eyed ‘coster genius’ who delighted the gallery with her sharp treatment of hecklers.⁵³ Sometimes he would escort them on their cab rides as they dashed across London from one hall to the next, and at the end of an evening he might go back to their lodgings for an impromptu supper of tripe and onions.⁵⁴ He came to love their world and their wit, the freedom of their unabashed engagement with life and language. He relished their sayings: Bessie Bellwood closing an argument with an irate cab driver with the remark, ‘Do you think I’m going to stand here to be insulted by a low-down, slab-sided cabman? I’m a public woman, I am!’; Katie Lawrence observing, as their cab horse began to prance, ‘Oh! A song and dance horse?’; or her succinct comment when – traversing a building site – she stubbed her toe on a brick, ‘Bugger the bricks!’ (to which a workman, who was walking behind her, replied, ‘Quite right, ma’m, quite right. Bugger the bricks!’).⁵⁵

They, for their part, were flattered by the attention of their young admirer. Not that he was a lone presence. Indeed Bessie Bellwood was the acknowledged mistress of the Duke of Manchester, who installed her in a house in Gower Street (causing, it must be supposed, some consternation amongst the high-minded denizens of that thoroughfare) and who could sometimes be seen driving her about in his brougham.⁵⁶ Sickert’s position as a painter counted for something – though art was not held in very high esteem by these theatrical performers. At one of Bessie Bellwood’s late-night ‘At Homes’ she produced an old oil painting, black with grime, that she had picked up at a junk shop. Sickert called for a bowl of hot water and a sponge and began cleaning off the dirt very gently. Bessie soon lost patience, grabbed the sponge from him, and started scrubbing away with a will, to reveal an image of St Lawrence on the griddle. When the next caller was announced she said that she couldn’t see him as she was ‘giving Lawrence a Turkish’.⁵⁷ Sickert’s own work was treated even more rudely by his models. When he asked Katie Lawrence if she would care to have one of the several life-sized portraits he had done of her, she replied, ‘No, not even to keep the wind out at the scullery door.’⁵⁸ It was for his looks, his humour, and his engaging character, that they liked him.

As they advanced, Sickert’s music-hall pictures grew avidly complex. He experimented with new and more intricate compositions; he viewed the stage from odd angles; and he played with the subtle shifts in tone and perspective effected by the smoky gilt-framed mirrors that lined the walls of his auditoria. Sickert’s fascination with reflected images and reflected light may have owed something to his glimpse of The Bar of the Folies Bergère at Manet’s studio, and perhaps more to Degas’ great interest in the whole subject.⁵⁹ But it was a theme that he took up as his own, and in exploring its possibilities his art took a stride forward in both its ambition and achievement. He became, by degrees, a master of low tones and their relations to rival even Whistler. Indeed some contemporaries came to believe that Sickert’s specific claim to ‘genius’ lay in this ‘extraordinarily sure sense of tone’.⁶⁰ Like Claude Lorrain he had, it seems, the ability to distinguish and order a greater range of light and darkness in a scene than other artists. In part, this was probably a natural gift – like the acute visual perception that allowed his grandfather to carry out his phenomenally accurate micrometer readings. But he honed his skill, and displayed his rare powers of concentration, amongst the flaring lights and dim reflections of the Old Bedford, Gatti’s, and Collins’s Music Hall, Islington Green.⁶¹

It is hard to know how far Sickert’s relations with his music-hall friends extended. It is possible, even likely, that he slept with some of his lionesses comiques: music-hall artistes had a reputation for sexual licence – the success of their acts was fuelled by the suggestive allure of sex – and Sickert from the first had been unfaithful to Ellen.⁶² Opportunity was not wanting. Sickert’s music-hall models came to the studio to pose, either for supplementary figure studies or for more formal portraits, and the unsuspecting Ellen was quite often away, down at Dunford, or off in Ireland monitoring the iniquities of British rule.⁶³ Certainly Sickert often took advantage of her absences.

He was, as his friends acknowledged, a man who ‘wanted a good deal of variety’ in his love life,⁶⁴ and he was prepared to seek it out. Some less friendly witnesses referred to him as ‘a coureur des dames’.⁶⁵ The chase seems to have ranged over the full social scale. His extravagantly good looks – particularly his beautiful hair and his kind eyes – and his extravagantly good manners gave him an extraordinary charm ‘for all women – Duchess or model’.⁶⁶ And though there is no record of his having seduced a duchess, tradition holds that he did bed at least some of his models.⁶⁷ (Even in the 1880s, when he painted few figure pictures, he regularly engaged models; Jacques-Émile Blanche remembered them as being game for jolly outings down to the Star and Garter at Richmond, and elsewhere.⁶⁸) Sickert also ‘sympathized’ with barmaids, wooing them – and bemusing them – with such impractical presents as gilt-edged editions of the classics.⁶⁹ But though the line between artist’s model, public-house worker, and prostitute was an unfixed one in late-Victorian London, Sickert does not appear to have been drawn to this milieu during his early married life.⁷⁰ Most of his affairs were, it seems, with women from his own social world. They came to Broadhurst Gardens where Ellen, ignorant of their true relations, met them ‘as friends visiting’. The infidelities either occurred elsewhere or when she was absent.⁷¹

Sickert treated his affairs lightly. He did not consider that they in any way compromised his marriage. He maintained always a perversely high regard for ‘blessed monogamy’, but believed it should be ‘reasonably tempered by the occasional caprice’.⁷² He was genuinely shocked at the idea that any unattached woman should wish him to leave Ellen for her – or, indeed, that any married woman might consider leaving her husband for him.⁷³ He liked the excitement of being in love, so he fell in love often – though, as he once remarked, ‘You can’t really love more than 2 or 3 women at a time.’⁷⁴ When a friend laughingly compared him to Shelley, ‘who thought “the more he loved the more love he had to give”’, Sickert answered ‘quite seriously, “Precisely, that is just it.”’⁷⁵ But his conception of love was less exalted than the great Romantic’s: he regarded it as no more than a diversion, to be played at ‘like a quadrille’.⁷⁶

Those mistresses rash enough to fall in love with him were almost invariably disappointed.⁷⁷ They soon discovered that his real and enduring passion was reserved for his art. An affair, to him, was no more than a stimulating recreation, a rest from the business of picture making. And picture making for Sickert had its own almost sexual thrill. He characterized the starting point of any painting as the artist’s ‘letch’ to record a particular scene (and the success of the picture could be judged on the extent to which it communicated that ‘letch’ to the viewer).⁷⁸ Throughout 1888 Sickert’s strongest and most recurrent ‘letch’ was for the darkened interiors of London’s music halls.

He stayed on in town late that summer, and was still hard at work during the first week of August when he learnt that Whistler, who had broken with Maud Franklin, was to marry Beatrice Godwin. (She had never divorced Godwin but he had died two years previously.⁷⁹) They made a happy and devoted pair. Beatrice, moreover, was supported by a close band of siblings, who could help her to provide Whistler with a new milieu, and a new stability, at a moment when – ousted from the RSBA – he might otherwise have succumbed to feelings of vulnerability and rejection. This new domestic circle came to provide a first forum for his thoughts and feelings on the great topics of his life: his work, his reputation, and his enemies. Sickert, like the other followers, found himself freer to pursue his own interests. But only so far. Even from a distance Whistler maintained a jealous watch over the doings of his disciples, ever ready to discern acts of presumption or betrayal. Sickert was fortunate to have an ally in Beatrice. She promoted his cause, and ensured that relations between master and erstwhile pupil continued happily, at least for the while.^*

Soon after Whistler’s marriage Sickert went over to France for his holiday, but without Ellen. His mother had taken a house at St Valéry-en-Caux, just down the coast from Dieppe, and was there with Bernhard, Oswald, and Leonard.⁸⁰ After the pressures of his London work, Walter had a chance to unwind. He found the small fishing village ‘a nice little place to sleep & eat in’, which, as he told Blanche, was what he was ‘most anxious to do now’.⁸¹ The appetite for work, however, very soon reasserted itself. He and Bernhard spent their days in swimming and painting. It was an ideal regime, and Mrs Sickert was able to report that both her older sons ‘look & are very well’. Walter was encouraging his brother to experiment with pastel and asked Blanche to send over some special ‘glasspaper & sandpaper canvas’ from the Dieppe art-supply shop for Bernhard to work on. The medium was one of Degas’ favourites, and it was being promoted in England through a series of Pastel Exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery. Shortly before crossing to France, Walter had spent a happy hour with the gallery’s new director, Paul Deschamps, looking at some Degas pictures they had in stock. He felt confident that under the new regime the Grosvenor’s annual pastel show ‘should become a sympathetic Exhibition’.⁸² He persuaded both Blanche and Bernhard to send to it.⁸³ Strangely, though, there is scant evidence that Walter himself was working in pastel at this period. Perhaps he felt obliged to leave the ground clear for his easily discouraged brother.^† Sickert concentrated his own energies on painting and drawing, producing amongst other things a bright little panel of the local butcher’s shop, its red frontage flushed in early autumnal sunshine. The motif was Whistlerian but the definition of the painting, and the boldness of the colour, brought it closer to the world of Manet and Degas.⁸⁴ He also – in a yet more obvious homage to Degas – made numerous detailed studies of a laundress working away with her smoothing iron.⁸⁵

By early October Sickert was back in London. He found the city in a state of simmering hysteria. Over the previous eight weeks, five East End prostitutes had been murdered and horribly mutilated by an unknown attacker. The two most recent victims had been discovered in the early hours of 30 September. A dedicated killer was on the loose. Theories as to his – or her – identity abounded. The press and the terrified public vied with each other to produce plausible culprits. The killer, it was thought, might be a Jewish immigrant, or a common vagrant, a released lunatic, a rogue slaughterman, a deranged butcher, a jealous prostitute, a mad doctor, or a neurotic medical student. There was even the suggestion that the killings could be the work of a giant eagle.⁸⁶ Theories were many, reliable leads few. The police, despite making numerous arrests, seemed no nearer to charging anyone. On 3 October they took the step of publishing two anonymous letters they had received from someone claiming to be the murderer. The first was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. The publication did little to advance the police investigation (it is now generally supposed that the letters were the work of a crank or a journalist), but it did provide the killer with a name – one that was at once taken up, and has never been put down since. Sickert appreciated the drama of the moment. He loved mysteries, and he knew the East End from his days acting at the Shoreditch Theatre and his more recent visits to the outlying music halls at Poplar, Canning Town, and the Mile End Road.⁸⁷ The general state of panic did nothing to curb his own nocturnal rambling. Almost as soon as he returned to London he resumed his evening studies in the stalls at Collins’s Music Hall on Islington Green.⁸⁸ He was probably more amused than alarmed when, walking home late one evening through King’s Cross, he passed a group of girls who fled from him shouting ‘Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper’. It was the only time during his life that anyone suggested that he was the killer.^*

There was one more murder, that of Mary Kelly on 9 November. After that, the terror gradually subsided but, as no one was ever caught, the mystery endured. It was supposed that the killer had fled the country or committed suicide. Sickert, however, had other things to concern him. Blanche came over to London briefly for the opening of the Pastel Exhibition at the Grosvenor. He was grateful to Sickert for effecting the entrée and, in what was becoming a regular ritual of exchanges, presented his friend with a picture. The meeting gave them a chance to lay plans. Sickert hoped that Blanche might persuade his friend Helleu to become a member of the NEAC. Such an ‘incontestable mâitre’ would be a useful addition to the ranks.⁸⁹ Sickert also advised Blanche to send something to the RSBA winter show, if only ‘to keep the pot boiling’, and, forgetting the complications that must ensue, even suggested that he might submit something boring himself.⁹⁰ In the event, he recalled his duty to Whistler and felt it wisest not to offend his former master by sending to Suffolk Street. Instead he exhibited one of his small panel pictures – a view of the ‘bains du Casino’ at Dieppe – at the less contentious Institute of Painters in Oil Colours.⁹¹ It was a useful means of keeping his name, and his work, before the public.

^* Whistler exhibited his painting of Ellen. Mrs Sickert thought it ‘not a scrap like her but … a fine picture and interesting’ (to Mrs Muller, 1887). The canvas was subsequently destroyed.

^* Two of the pictures were, however, admired by the representatives of Liverpool’s annual Art Exhibition, and were selected for inclusion in their show at the Walker Art Gallery that autumn.

^* Rose Pettigrew, a young model (sometimes used by Whistler, and etched by Sickert in 1884), recalled Beatrice advising her against having an affair with Steer, who was in love with her, on the grounds ‘that Sickert was much more clever than Steer [as] time would tell’ (Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 119).

† Sickert had sent a little ‘still life’ pastel to Les XX in 1887, but it had not attracted a great deal of attention. In a letter to Blanche, however, he does mention a dinner at the Hogarth Club in the autumn of 1888 at which Sir Coutts Lindsay, owner of the Grosvenor Gallery, asked him with ‘une naïveté et une politesse exquise’ if he had ever tried pastel – ‘!’. The level and direction of Sickert’s irony, as indicated by his exclamation mark, is difficult to gauge. Had Sickert submitted a pastel that had been rejected? Had he enjoyed an acclaimed success with a pastel elsewhere? Or had he simply not tried pastel seriously yet?

^* See Postscript.