Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 16

You have given us a great lift.

(Walter Sickert to D. C. Thomson)

The band of ‘Followers’ that had once gathered around Whistler, or sat about the paraffin stove in Baker Street, was rapidly losing its cohesion. Menpes, already ostracized by Whistler on account of an unsanctioned sketching trip to Japan (an artistic world that had been mapped and colonized but never actually visited by the Master), became a focus for active attack when, towards the end of 1888, a series of highly complimentary articles on him and his work appeared in the press.¹ Whistler was furious, and sought to enlist Sickert’s aid in countering such unmerited publicity.² Sickert counselled restraint. He wrote to Beatrice, knowing the beneficial influence she exerted over her excitable husband: ‘Tell Jimmy not on any account to be drawn by Menpes’ rot. It is the one object he would like to achieve … He must be let severely alone. Tell Jimmy he mustn’t say good things about him because that is advertisement.’³ Whistler was never likely to take such good advice. He responded with a salvo of vituperative – even vicious – squibs in the pages of The World that damned Menpes as a talentless plagiarist. Sickert’s own friendship with Menpes did not survive this campaign of abuse. The ferocity of Whistler’s feelings would have made it difficult for anyone to remain friends with both men. Moreover, Sickert’s relationship with Menpes had always been largely fortuitous: it was fostered by their common bond with Whistler, and once that bond was broken there was little else to keep them together. Menpes, probably to Sickert’s relief, did not join the NEAC, or send any more pictures there. Another casualty from the group was William Stott of Oldham, who had been looking after Maud Franklin since the break-up of her relationship with Whistler. Incensed by what he considered to be Whistler’s shoddy treatment of his one-time mistress, he had publicly insulted his erstwhile hero one evening at the Hogarth Club, and then got into an unseemly scuffle with him.⁴ Elizabeth Armstrong also drifted out of the circle. On a sketching trip down to St Ives she had met and become engaged to the plein-air painter Stanhope Forbes, who, although still a member of the NEAC, was in stark opposition to Sickert’s faction. He disapproved of Whistler and Sickert, and urged his fiancée to disassociate herself from such bad – if amusing – influences.⁵

Sickert, with touching solicitude, constantly sought to reassure Whistler of his own enduring loyalty and support, but the main focus of his energies – and the balance of his allegiances – had subtly shifted. He was now an ‘Impressionist’ rather than merely a ‘Whistlerite’. His thoughts were concentrated on the New English Art Club; and, despite repeated solicitations, Whistler still stood out from the group.⁶ It had been supposed by several commentators that, once ousted from Suffolk Street, Whistler would find a refuge at the NEAC; but, though he continued to allow his work to be exhibited, he declined to become a member of the new body.⁷ It was said that the former President of the RSBA disdained to join a club that was so democratic as to have no president.⁸ Certainly he must have realized that he would not be able to regain the same level of command over his ‘pupil’ as he had once enjoyed.

Whistler’s absence from the NEAC gave Sickert a freer hand, and he rose in stature and assurance. In his plans for the infiltration of the NEAC – and the promotion of the ‘Impressionist clique’ – he adopted many of Whistler’s tactics, as well as something of his pose. He became a noted figure in Chelsea and beyond, conspicuous in his ‘wonderful clothes’. His ‘dashing’ dove-grey tailcoat projected an air of theatricality;⁹ and the cultivation of a splendid ‘large fair moustache’ lent him a new distinction – ‘like a French cavalryman of the day’.¹⁰ He affected a huge ribboned bow instead of a necktie, and persuaded several other members of the clique to follow this example of ‘Latin Quarter’ chic.¹¹

Beyond the advertisement of dress, he sought to publicize the aims and character of the clique. His pupillage at Tite Street had taught him much about the importance of gaining a voice in the press, even if he felt that Whistler sometimes went too far to secure such coverage (devoting precious hours on one occasion to wooing the sports reporter of the Fulham local paper in the hope of a flattering mention).¹² Sickert strove to find more sympathetic allies. Of the established critics, only the querulous and somewhat prissy Frederick Wedmore, who wrote in both the weekly Academy and the daily Standard, had any knowledge, or appreciation, of French Impressionism; but his cautious approbation would need to be backed by new – and more enthusiastic – voices. There were several clamouring to be heard. It was a time of great proliferation in the press. Cheap printing costs and an ever-expanding urban readership had led to an efflorescence of new papers and periodicals, and amongst these publications Sickert found willing supporters.

His great ally was George Moore. The author of A Modern Lover was, of course, sympathetic to the aims and ideals of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique; and although Moore’s only regular column was in The Hawk, a small-circulation paper published by his brother, his energy, his wit, and his own growing reputation as a writer striving to transpose French literary innovations into English gave him a profile out of proportion to his immediate readership. For Sickert, his great knowledge of the Parisian scene, his memories of Manet, and his friendship with Degas made him an invaluable repository of information. Sickert and the other young ‘Impressionists’ respected him enormously. They put up with his eccentricities (he had a habit of turning up unannounced at Broadhurst Gardens, to share his latest ‘very important’ discovery);^* they invited him to their councils; and they listened to his views. Elie Halévy, after spending time in London with the NEAC crowd, described them as being ‘ruled over by George Moore’.¹³ As Sickert later admitted, news that Moore ‘liked, or didn’t like, one of our pictures’ flew at once ‘round the Hogarth Club … And I believe we were genuinely elated or depressed’ according to his verdict.¹⁴

Besides the oracular Moore there were several young painters who had taken to part-time reviewing.^* Unsurprisingly, amongst these there were several pro-Whistlerians: the absurdity of allowing non-artists to criticize art had, after all, been one of the planks of Whistler’s attack on Ruskin. Alfred Lys Baldry, who had studied under Albert Moore and was an acknowledged admirer of Whistler, contributed regularly to a small-circulation weekly called The Artist & Journal of Home Culture. He was at once brought within the ambit of the ‘Impressionist’ group and encouraged to join the NEAC.¹⁵ Sickert made an even closer friend of the Scottish-born painter George Thomson, who shared with Steer both a studio building and an interest in Monet. Thomson was supplementing his income by writing up exhibitions for the evening papers,¹⁶ and despite a strong Aberdonian burr and a ‘rather gruffly gloomy address’ Sickert found him a ‘gentle and sympathetic’ soul.¹⁷ He too began to send to the NEAC and to promote the Impressionist cause in his articles.

Indeed it soon became a complaint against Sickert and his Impressionist clique that they were suborning critics by ‘offering wall space not for their articles but for their works’.¹⁸ But the line between critics and artists was becoming increasingly blurred. Sickert merely sought to accelerate the process and use it to his advantage – or to the advantage of his group. It was, after all, a surer path than relying on ‘letters to the editor’ or stray paragraphs in the gossip columns, as Whistler did. Sickert himself played his part, taking a position as art critic for the recently inaugurated London edition of the New York Herald.¹⁹ The post gave him a regular platform for promoting his artistic creed, as well – it must be supposed – as some welcome, if meagre, remuneration.

Reckless, opinionated, fluent, fond of specific technical details and broad generalizations, Sickert – it was soon revealed – had a gift for journalism. Words and opinions flowed from his pen. He did give some generous approbation to fellow members of the Impressionist clique, but on the whole his procedure was less direct.²⁰ One almost invariable element in his articles was a word of extravagant praise for Whistler. Matters reached such a pitch that the sub-editor of the paper, meeting Sickert in Regent Street, remonstrated: ‘See here, Mr Sickert … people are asking whether the New York Herald is a Whistler organ.’²¹ In truth, however, the regular praise for Whistler was almost always balanced or augmented by praise for Degas and for Keene.²² Sickert seems to have been concerned to produce a genealogy for his Impressionist group: Whistler and Degas were acknowledged as the founding fathers – with Steer’s hero, Monet, included upon occasion. But, though proud of such antecedents, Sickert was anxious not to place his group too squarely in the debt of recent Parisian developments. He did not want to be too easily pigeonholed as a mere follower of Continental fashion. And having proclaimed the connection he sought to blur it. The recurrent introduction of Keene’s name served to connect the group with the proud English tradition stretching back through the great eighteenth-century illustrators to Hogarth. It was a ploy sanctioned, if not suggested, by Degas. The French painter had told George Moore (and probably Sickert too) that English artists risked compromising their distinctiveness if they lost touch with their national school.²³ Degas, too, had impressed upon Sickert a conviction that all great art – however novel it might appear – stood upon the traditions of the past: that the achievements of Impressionism were not comprehensible without Poussin and Velásquez, Ingres, Millet, Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner. Sickert’s articles constantly sought to connect the movement with this illustrious heritage.

When writing explicitly about the NEAC, as he did with unabashed frequency, he emphasized both the diversity and the independence of the Impressionist clique – pointing out that not all the members were pupils of Whistler, and that not all had studied in Paris, and boasting, on the rather slender grounds that Blanche took an interest in their doings, that ‘the younger and more forward spirits of the Modern French School’ are more influenced by the ‘independent school of painting in England’ than vice versa.²⁴

Sickert continued to canvass potential new members and new exhibitors for the club – as it was by the votes of these that control of the committees could be maintained. There were several convenient sources. Brown’s position at the Westminster School of Art gave him access to a large and loyal constituency. When, at the beginning of March 1889, he was the recipient of a special dinner at the Holborn Restaurant, over a hundred people – mostly current or former pupils – were present. (Sickert made a speech.²⁵) Bate, too, had started ‘a school of Impressionists’, while Sidney Starr ran a popular class for ‘lady-pupils’.²⁶ Sickert, for his part, maintained pressure on Blanche to find members in France. Besides Helleu, two other young artists – Maurice Lobre and Jean-Louis Forain (whom Sickert had met through Degas) – expressed an interest in joining;²⁷ and within the club’s existing membership Sickert was pleased to make an ally of the Paris-trained John Singer Sargent, who was establishing an enviable reputation with his fluent, large-scale portraits of the London rich. Sargent agreed to propose Lobre for membership. It was a useful gesture. As Sickert acknowledged, he could not afford to be too active in putting people’s names forward himself, as it would provoke the hostility of the club’s conservative majority.²⁸

But, by such tactics, that conservative majority was being gradually eroded. The Impressionist clique continued to control the picture-selection process. The constitution was altered during 1889, and an eight-man ‘executive committee’ created, with Sickert, Steer, Brown, and Roussel all elected to it.²⁹ As some contemporary commentators complained, pictures by artists inimical to the aims of the group were now frequently excluded, or ‘outrageously skied’ at exhibition. In the face of such ‘intrigue and effrontery’ not a few painters resigned from the club, thus presenting the Impressionist clique with an even clearer run.³⁰

Certainly they had it very much their own way in 1889. The connection with the established leaders of French Impressionism was loudly bruited at the annual exhibition.^* An uncatalogued selection of black-and-white works, almost certainly put together by Sickert, was hung in the little passage leading through to the main gallery. Besides the inevitable Keene drawings, it included several prints by Whistler (who also had a pastel in the exhibition proper), together with four of the lithographs G. W. Thornley had made from Degas’ pictures (and about which Sickert had written in the New York Herald).³¹ In addition there were also ‘a few photographs from masterpieces by Degas and Manet’.³² Building upon his success of the previous year, Sickert’s own submission to the show was another slice of popular metropolitan life: Collins’s Music Hall, Islington Green. In its composition, as in its theatrical matter, it proclaimed a continuing debt to Degas – though Sickert, playing his double game, hastened to deny the connection. From the aesthetic high ground staked out by Whistler in the Ten o’Clock Lecture, he defended himself against any suggestions that he was merely aping modern French models:

It is surely unnecessary to go so far afield as Paris to find an explanation of the fact that a Londoner should seek to render on canvas a familiar and striking scene in the midst of the town in which he lives … I found myself one night in the little hall off Islington Green. At a given moment I was intensely impressed by the pictorial beauty of the scene, created by the coincidence of a number of fortuitous elements of form and colour. A graceful girl leaning forward from the stage, to accentuate the refrain of one of the sentimental ballads so dear to the frequenters of the halls, evoked a spontaneous movement of sympathy and attention in an audience whose sombre tones threw into more brilliant relief the animated movement of the singer, bathed as she was in a ray of green limelight from the centre of the roof, and from below in the yellow radiance of the footlights.³³

The rising status of both Sickert and his group was confirmed when he, together with Starr and Steer, was invited to exhibit in the ‘British Fine Art Section’ of the Universal Exhibition, which opened in Paris that May. (Sickert sent his little panel of the red-fronted butcher’s shop³⁴.) He did not, however, dwell upon his successes. In what was becoming an established pattern, his small assertion of independence was almost immediately countered by an act of obeisance to Whistler. Sickert balanced his NEAC activities and achievements with an offer to arrange a retrospective exhibition of Whistler’s work. He also suggested an even more ambitious scheme to produce ‘a catalogue déraisonné’ of Whistler’s prints.³⁵ It was probably no less than Whistler felt he deserved. He was in ebullient mood. He had been made an ‘Honorary Member’ of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich after exhibiting at their International Art Show the previous year; and he was to be the guest of honour at two gala dinners arranged by his fellow artists that spring. The first was held in Paris on 28 April 1889, the other at the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly Circus on 1 May. Sickert attended the London event, though he did not help organize it. He was too involved with preparations for the Whistler exhibition, which opened on the same day.

The exhibition venue was an unconventional one. Sickert had been given the use of three little first-floor rooms in an old Queen Anne house at 29 Queen Square, Bloomsbury – the building was the home of the College for Working Men and Women. In this limited space he had gathered together ‘a little collection of masterpieces’: pastels, watercolours, and etchings, together with several important pictures, including the portraits of Rosa Corda, Thomas Carlyle, and the artist’s mother. From Irving, Sickert borrowed the picture of the actor as King Philip (the image that had first awakened him to Whistler’s genius). It was an impressive assemblage, as Sickert hastened to point out in the New York Herald.³⁶ For no very obvious reason the Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, was asked to open the exhibition.^* Nevertheless, despite this ploy, the show was not a success. It was unable to transcend its unpropitious setting. Press coverage was scant, and visitors rare.

Amongst the few people who did attend were two Americans recently settled in London. Joseph Pennell, then in his early thirties, had already established a reputation as an accomplished draughtsman and illustrator; his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, was a prolific journalist. Together they had succeeded Shaw in writing the art criticism for The Star. They were amazed by the show, and ‘wrote urgently in the Star’, urging everyone ‘who cared for good work … to see this exhibition of “the man who has done more to influence artists than any other modern”’.³⁷ It was the first blast of what would become an almost interminable fanfare over the ensuing years, as the Pennells established themselves as the jealous champions of Whistler’s name and reputation. Their championship came to have awkward consequences for Sickert’s own relationship with Whistler but, at this early stage, he was merely happy to meet two sympathetic new critics, and grateful to them for giving the show a generous puff.

If there was a sense of disappointment about the impact of the exhibition, neither Sickert nor Whistler admitted it. They continued to see each other socially. Sickert would still be invited to lunch at Whistler’s studio, especially when his favourite ‘gumbo soup’ was being served,³⁸ and the Whistlers dined at Broadhurst Gardens.^* Nevertheless, beneath the jollity, and the offers of assistance, there remained the sense that Sickert’s attention was elsewhere. Nothing came of the plans for a catalogue of Whistler’s prints: the current of Sickert’s other interests had become too strong. On 25 May 1889, Ellen and he bought Degas’ magnificent Répétition d’un Ballet sur la Scène at Christie’s in the sale of the Henry Hill collection. It was, Sickert noted, similar in composition to the ‘monochrome’ they had seen at M. Mulbacher’s apartment. They paid only £74 for it.³⁹

In June, Sickert resigned his post on the New York Herald, claiming that ‘to do the work thoroughly made too great an inroad on [his] time’.⁴⁰ The respite from journalism was only temporary. Perhaps it allowed him to take a short holiday – at some point during the summer he nipped over to Paris to see his picture at the Universal Exhibition. He went round the show with Degas. It was a thrilling, and entertaining, experience. As they crossed the Jardins du Trocadéro, where countless families were picnicking on the grass, Degas observed, ‘C’est l’âge d’or en bronze!’ They studied the British section ‘with some care’. Degas enjoyed ‘mystifying people’ by making great claims for the work of very minor artists:⁴¹ he certainly shocked Sickert by praising the handling of a waterfall painted by Frank Miles. But on the whole his comments, though barbed with wit, had a strong practical edge. He greatly admired a picture of a country christening by James Charles, but considered that it ‘would have been better on a somewhat smaller scale’.⁴² Confronted by Whistler’s Lady Archibald Campbell, he remarked of the elegantly attired lady retreating into the gloom of an undefined background, ‘Elle rentre dans la cave de Watteau.’^†43 (Whistler’s other submission – Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony – had been awarded the Gold Medal. It was a work of 1865, and perhaps gave Sickert a sense of how long it took for new ways of seeing and painting to be understood or appreciated.) Sadly, Degas’ verdict upon Sickert’s October Sun is unrecorded.

Time spent with Degas – visiting galleries, looking at pictures, talking of art – deepened Sickert’s awe and admiration. The exceptional cohesion, or ‘purity’ as Sickert described it, of Degas’ life made a great impression. Instead of deploying his will, his talent, and his wit to make himself ‘notorious’ – as, to some extent, Whistler had done – he remained always true to his art.⁴⁴ As Sickert remarked to Blanche, shortly after returning to London, ‘I find more & more, in half a sentence that Degas has said, guidance for years of work.’⁴⁵

Sickert’s main undertaking during the latter half of 1889 was to arrange an exhibition by the core members of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique.⁴⁶ David Croal Thomson, the young – and, as Sickert asserted, ‘fearless’ – manager of the progressive Goupil Gallery in New Bond Street, had offered them the use of his space in December. Although it was a group venture, necessitating the usual round of discussions and excited studio meetings, Sickert was, as ever, the presiding spirit and the acknowledged spokesman.⁴⁷ He helped define the limits of the group: Fred Brown, Francis Bate, Wilson Steer, Sidney Starr, Francis James, and Théodore Roussel were, of course, included; but it was probably Sickert’s influence that secured the inclusion of his brother Bernhard and George Thomson, and his indulgence that admitted Paul Maitland.⁴⁸

They chose to exhibit under the name of the ‘London Impressionists’. The title was obvious enough, perhaps even inevitable; if they had not adopted it themselves they might well have been given it by others.⁴⁹ Sickert, however, continuing the theme of his newspaper articles, worked hard to extend, if not to explode, critical preconceptions. While always admitting the eminence of Whistler and Degas, he insisted upon other perspectives and influences. When quizzed by one interviewer about what an ‘Impressionist’ was, Sickert – after some evasion – replied, ‘A definition is a terrible thing, but the meaning that we should attach to the word, if it is to stand in any way as a declaration of faith on our part, must be a very catholic one. The main article of the creed would perhaps be study and reverence for the best traditions of all time. Velasquez was an Impressionist, and Leech was an Impressionist, and Holbein was an Impressionist.’⁵⁰

Sickert planned to exhibit three complex new music-hall paintings as well as a couple of less contentious pieces. Racing to finish his pictures for the show, he drove himself into a frenzy of activity. When Blanche came over to London in the autumn he found Sickert ‘up to [his] ears in work’. Dinner was out of the question: ‘I am tied up for the week in a picture of an obscure Music Hall in a northern suburb which necessitates my going without dinner to be in my eighteenpenny stall on the stroke of eight.’⁵¹ And for most of the day he was ‘full of appointments with models and serio-comics’. He could meet his friend only for a hurried lunch ‘at one o’clock (exactly)’.

As well as sketching from the ‘eighteenpenny stalls’ and having sittings from ‘serio-comics’, Sickert deployed other elements in building up his pictures. He spent time that winter working at Heatherley’s, the old-established teaching studio in Newman Street. Although he seems, in part, to have used the school merely as a convenient central London workspace, it did offer him a chance to experiment with effects of light, or semi-darkness. One young student retained ‘lively recollections’ of his visits to the ‘dingy old academy’: ‘It was a winter of much fog and consequent gaslight, and Sickert, with his then preoccupation with “atmospherics,” was in his element.’ He rarely ‘painted from the models’, but made ‘impressionist studies of figures or groups of students seen through the murk’.^*52

It was hoped that George Moore might write a preface to the exhibition catalogue, but at the last moment the arrangement fell through.⁵³ Sickert dashed off a piece in his stead, commencing with a feisty attack on William Morris and the so-called decorative painting of the Pre-Raphaelite school – characterized by its ‘absence of convincing light and shade, of modelling, of aerial perspective, of sound drawing, of animation, of expression’. He insisted that what really mattered in painting was ‘that subtle attribute which painters call quality’; he dragged in the familiar names, and he ended with his most considered – and personal – definition of ‘Impressionism’:

Essentially and firstly, it is not realism. It has no wish to record any thing merely because it exists. It is not occupied in a struggle to make intensely real and solid the sordid or superficial details of the subjects it selects. It accepts, as the aim of the picture, what Edgar Allan Poe asserts to be the sole legitimate province of the poem, beauty. In its search through visible nature for the elements for this same beauty, it does not admit the narrow interpretation of the word ‘Nature’ which would stop short outside the four-mile radius [enclosing metropolitan London]. It is, on the contrary, strong in the belief that for those who live in the most wonderful and complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and the poetry which they daily see around them, by means which they believe are offered to the student in all their perfection, not so much on the canvases that yearly line our official and unofficial shows of competitive painting, as on the walls of the National Gallery.⁵⁴

The exhibition opened on 30 November 1889 to considerable critical and public interest. It achieved an almost immediate notoriety. Some fifty reviews were published, and by the end of the week the gallery was not merely crowded but ‘absolutely blocked’.⁵⁵ There were sixty-nine pictures on view, of which Sickert had contributed just four.^* What the crowds made of it is uncertain. Of the critics, Moore, Baldry, the Pennells, and Frederick Wedmore rallied, of course, to the standard and lavished a great deal of generous praise on Sickert’s music-hall pictures.⁵⁶ But other voices prevailed. The vast majority of reviewers were either hostile or nonplussed. They complained of the paint-work and despaired at ‘the sheer unmitigated ugliness’ of the predominantly urban subject matter.⁵⁷

Sickert’s attempts to dissolve ‘Impressionism’ back into the whole history of art were ignored by his allies and condemned by his enemies in the press. The claim of kinship with Velázquez was treated as presumptuous nonsense.⁵⁸ Whatever their stamp, the critics, having only recently gained an outline knowledge of French Impressionism, were only too anxious to display it. The London Impressionists were ranged under the banners of their supposed masters. The influence of Monet’s technique was noted on the works of Steer, Thomson, and Bernhard Sickert. The debt owed by Roussel and Maitland to Whistler was too obvious to escape comment, while Sickert – along with Starr – was characterized as an imitator of Degas.⁵⁹

It was an outcome that Sickert had sought to avoid. But if it undermined the group’s aspirations towards originality it did not vitiate the impact of the show, or its influence. In the New Year, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts’ annual exhibition devoted a special section to the work of the ‘London Impressionists’, along with what one critic described as ‘the contributions of certain Scottish painters … whose aims are fresh enough – may one say eccentric enough? – to bear comparison with these’.⁶⁰ Sickert felt able to commend Thomson for striking ‘the timeliest and most effective blow’ yet in favour of the Impressionist cause.⁶¹

^* One day Sickert was disturbed at his easel by Moore bursting in and declaring: ‘I have been reading a life of Michael Angelo, and it seems that the David was carved out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried. I could no more have carved the David out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried than I could have flown!’ (RE, 97) He also called upon Sickert for help with the great question of how to keep his trousers up. When Sickert patiently explained to him the proper use of braces, he was dumbfound at the revelation. And on another occasion he dragged Sickert and Steer from their studios to take them on an excursion to Peckham Rye, because he had determined that the heroine of the story he was working on should come from there – and he had never visited the place (ML, 26).

^* Sickert also cherished hopes of George Bernard Shaw, who was then acting as art critic for the newly established Liberal evening-paper The Star. He recognized him as ‘a critic who knows an artistic hawk from the hernshaw of commerce’. Shaw’s tenure of the post, however, was brief, and his independence of spirit not readily susceptible to direction. Sickert soon dubbed him ‘George Bernard Cock-sure’ (WS to Lady Eden).

^* Steer, Bate, Brown, and Roussel were all on the selection committee. Whistler, too, had been elected to it, though it is not known whether he served (Comus, 1 January 1889).

^* Lord Halsbury was one of very few criminal lawyers to become Lord Chancellor. As Hardinge Giffard, QC – before his ennoblement – he had been a leading counsel in the Tichborne case, a fact that would surely have interested Sickert, and perhaps even accounts for their connection.

^* The American novelist Gertrude Atherton recalled meeting them there in the late 1880s, when Whistler ‘monopolized the conversation at table’ with brilliantly witty denunciations of all the other leading artists of the day: Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Watts, and Alma-Tadema.

† ‘She is returning to Watteau’s cellar.’

^* Sickert retained fond memories of Heatherley’s. When he came to fill in his Who’s Who entry in 1897, for the inaugural 1898 edition, in a deliberate snub to both the Slade and to Whistler he listed it as the sole seat of his ‘education’.

^* Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall, The Oxford Music Hall, The PS Wings in the OP Mirror, and Twilight [‘The Butcher’s Shop’]; a fifth picture, Trefolium, though listed in the catalogue, was not mentioned by any of the critics and seems not to have been hung.