Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 6

He is a dear little fellow.

(Eleanor Sickert to Oswald Adalbert Sickert)

Walter Richard Sickert was born on 31 May 1860 in a first-floor flat at 59 Augustenstrasse, Munich, in what was then the independent kingdom of Bavaria.¹ He was the first-born child of Oswald Adalbert Sickert and his wife Eleanor. Oswald Sickert was a Dane, from the town of Altona in the Duchy of Holstein. He was a trained artist, with ambitions as a painter, but he was constrained to work as a hack draughtsman-on-wood for a Bavarian illustrated comic-paper called the Fliegende Blätter. Eleanor – or Nelly as she was known by her affectionate husband and her friends and relatives – was English by birth. The couple spoke mainly English at home.² Their new son was christened by the English chaplain at Munich: he was given the names Walter Richard.³ Walter was chosen as being a name that looked – even if it did not sound – the same in both English and German.⁴ Richard was the name of the boy’s maternal grandfather, the late Revd Richard Sheepshanks, a figure whose presence loomed over the young family, half beneficent, half reproachful.

Richard Sheepshanks had not been a conventional clergyman. He had scarcely been a clergyman at all. He never held any cure. His interest in the celestial sphere, though keen, had been scientific. He made his reputation as an astronomer and mathematician. The Sheepshanks came of prosperous Yorkshire stock. The family in the generation before had made a fortune in cloth, supplying – so it was said – material for military greatcoats to the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. The money from the Leeds factories amassed in this profitable trade allowed Richard and his five siblings to indulge their interests and enthusiasms. One brother, Thomas, chose Brighton and dissipation.⁵ Another, John, dedicated himself to art: he moved to London and built up a large and important collection of English paintings, which he exhibited to the public at his house in Rutland Gate and bequeathed to the nation in 1857, six years before his death.^*6

Richard turned to the sciences. A brilliant university career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was crowned with a mathematics fellowship in 1817. He briefly contemplated the prospect of both the law and the Church and secured the necessary qualifications for both. (Having taken holy orders, he always styled himself ‘the Reverend’.) On receiving his inheritance, however, he was able to direct all his considerable energies to scientific research. He became a member of the Geological and Astronomical Societies, and was for several years the editor of the latter’s Monthly Notes. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the University of London. His interests were many, ranging from demographics to the study of weights and measures. He had a particular passion for fine scientific instruments and devoted most of his income to buying them. He also busied himself in the intellectual and political disputes of the scientific world.⁷

In scientific circles Richard Sheepshanks was greatly respected – much loved by his friends and not a little feared by his enemies. He was, in the restrained words of his close colleague, the astronomer Augustus de Morgan, a man of ‘very decided opinions’. And he was not shy of expressing them. His first professional training had been as a lawyer, and throughout his academic career he had a relish for controversies. He was, as he himself put it, well suited to such business, having ‘leisure, courage and contempt for opinion when he knew he was right’. He was well armed with a ready, if somewhat sarcastic, wit and a piquant turn of phrase. But in matters of what he considered to be of real importance he would – according to one obituarist – drop these weapons in favour of a more ‘earnest deportment’ and a more ‘temperate’ utterance. Despite being of ‘hardly middle stature’, having red-tinged hair and the inevitable side-whiskers of mid-Victorian fashion, he was, from the evidence of his portraits, a handsome man. He was also excellent company – clever, witty, well read in both the classics and in modern literature, and widely travelled in Europe.⁸ He was knowledgeable too about art; and, tipped off by his brother John, commissioned Thomas Lawrence to paint a portrait of his beloved elder sister, Anne.⁹

Anne Sheepshanks was as remarkable as her brother. A woman of enormous practical capability, intelligence, and sound sense, she encouraged and supported Richard in all his endeavours. She allied her resources to his, sharing his interests, his cares, and his house. The home they established together at 30 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury – not far from the British Museum – became a lively gathering place for many of the intellectual luminaries of scientific London. They even built their own small observatory in the garden, from which, in an age before saturated street-lighting, they were able to mark the passage of the stars.¹⁰

The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks – like his sister – never married. His fellowship at Cambridge was dependent upon his remaining a bachelor, and he seems to have been in no hurry to give up his position, his salary, or his independence. Nevertheless, he did not allow professional considerations to stand altogether between him and the opposite sex.

It is not known exactly how or when he encountered Eleanor Henry. Indeed, very little is known about Eleanor Henry at all, except that she was Irish, fair-haired and handsome, and was a dancer on the London stage.¹¹ Perhaps Mr Sheepshanks picked her out of a chorus line. Or perhaps he met her in the street. At the beginning of the 1830s she was living in Henrietta Street, a little cul-de-sac behind Brunswick Square, near to the Sheepshanks’ London home.^* The popular reputation of dancers in the nineteenth century set them very low in the moral order; they were ranked beneath even actresses, and set almost on a par with prostitutes. This picture, however, was certainly a distortion. Although ‘respectability’ was a rather fluid concept during the early Victorian age, most ballet girls actually came from modestly ‘respectable’ homes, and lived – as far as can be ascertained – modestly ‘respectable’ lives.¹² Eleanor Henry’s position seems to confirm this point. For a start she was married. Her husband was a Mr James Henry. He listed his profession as ‘Solicitor’, although he does not appear in the law lists of the period and may well have been little more than a lawyer’s clerk.¹³ At the beginning of the 1830s they were living together in the house of a Mrs Henry (perhaps James’s mother).¹⁴ Despite this unpropitious domestic arrangement, the Revd Richard Sheepshanks succeeded not only in forming an attachment with Eleanor but also in fathering a child on her. A daughter was born on 19 August 1830.¹⁵

Mr Henry’s attitude to, or indeed knowledge of, his wife’s liaison is unknown. He did, however, give his surname and his blessing to the infant. It was he, rather than Richard Sheepshanks, who attended the christening at St Pancras Parish Church and who had himself listed as the child’s legal father. The little girl was baptized Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry. The last Christian name is something of a mystery, as the Henrys did not, as far as records show, belong to the Moravian sect.¹⁶

The young Eleanor Louisa – or Nelly – was brought up in the Henry household. If Richard Sheepshanks provided some assistance he did so covertly. Nevertheless, his interest in his natural daughter does seem to have been real and, given the proximity of Woburn Place to Henrietta Street, he must have had opportunities for observing her. Almost nothing is known of Nelly Henry’s childhood, except that it was not happy. The demands of her mother’s stage work meant that she was often neglected. She did, however, show an early love for music. Her mother sang to her, and the songs of the passing street performers also caught her ear, making a lasting impression on her memory and her imagination.¹⁷

The Henrys moved from Henrietta Street in 1833. They disappear from view but almost certainly remained in London, for, at some moment later in the decade, Eleanor broke with her husband and began a relationship with Samuel Buchanan Green, a dancing master from Highgate. She took her daughter with her and, though there is no evidence to suggest that she married Mr Green, she took his name and the young Nelly came to regard Mr Green as her ‘step-father’.¹⁸ In November 1838, when Eleanor gave birth to a son, christened Alfred, she listed her name on the birth certificate as ‘Green, late Henry’.¹⁹ In 1840, the Greens established a dancing school in connection with the Princess Theatre in Oxford Street. The teaching studio was immediately behind the theatre at 36 Castle Street and the family lived above it – an arrangement that can only have increased the 10-year-old Nelly’s love of music.²⁰

Perhaps the Revd Richard Sheepshanks disapproved of these new domestic conditions, or maybe the arrival of young Alfred placed a strain on the resources of the Green household; perhaps the Sheepshanks’ own plans to move out of London precipitated the change. Whatever the reason, at about this time Richard offered to take his natural daughter under his own care, to remove her from the stage-door world of Castle Street, to arrange for her schooling, and to provide in some as yet unspecified measure for her future. The offer was accepted and, at the beginning of the 1840s, the old loosely fixed order was broken up.²¹

Nelly was sent over the Channel to a small boarding school at Neuville-lès-Dieppe. Richard Sheepshanks and his sister closed up Woburn Place and moved to a house on the outskirts of Reading, where once again they built a little observatory in the garden. The Greens continued with their school at Castle Street. And according to family tradition Mrs ‘Green, late Henry’ also performed on the stage of the Princess Theatre.²² It is doubtful that she ever saw her daughter again. She might have encountered Richard Sheepshanks occasionally. He returned often to London during the first years of the new decade. He was engaged in the great work of his later life: the establishment of a new set of standard weights and measures, the former one having been destroyed in the fire that swept through the Palace of Westminster in 1832. In a well-insulated subterranean laboratory in the cellars of Somerset House, he carried out tens of thousands of micro-measurements in order to determine the standard yard.²³ It was a staggering exercise of both patience and artistry. He had, it was recognized, ‘an extraordinarily skilful eye with the micrometer’ and his comparisons ‘were so far superior to those of all preceding experimenters … as to defy all competition on grounds of accuracy’.²⁴

In 1850, Eleanor and Samuel Green vanish from the London Directories. According to the family tradition preserved by Nelly, they emigrated to Australia, where Mrs Green took to drink.²⁵ It has been supposed that Richard Sheepshanks arranged, if he did not insist upon, this removal, but there is no evidence to support such a theory. Nevertheless, the notion of a close relative disappearing to the Antipodes never to be heard of again was powerful in its suggestion. It became one of the defining elements in young Nelly Henry’s personal story. And it was a story that in time she would communicate to her own children, thrilling them with its mingled sense of mystery and loss. The actual moment of Eleanor Green’s departure from England, however, probably passed unknown across the Channel by her daughter.²⁶

Dieppe in the 1840s already had an established expatriate colony. Living was cheap there compared to England. The completion of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the introduction of steam packet-boats meant that it took a mere eleven hours to travel from London to the French port. Mrs Maria Slee’s school, set – across the harbour from the old town – on the still verdant slopes of Neuville, was one of several educational establishments in the area catering for English children:²⁷ the bracing sea air was considered to be beneficial to youth.²⁸ Mrs Slee’s was a happy place, and it offered Nelly the structure and companionship that had been lacking from the lonely and bohemian years of her childhood, and also the security of real affection.

She boarded there not only during the terms but also in the holidays, growing in time to be less a pupil than a part of the family. Mrs Slee was almost a second mother to Nelly; her daughters ‘became much attached’ to their young English charge, and she to them.²⁹ It was during these years that Dieppe developed, for Nelly, into a charmed place – the place where ‘she was happy and well for the first time’.³⁰

She stayed at the school until she was almost eighteen, becoming strong, handsome and accomplished. She learnt to speak French ‘with a good accent at least’.³¹ Her status and her future prospects, however, remained a mystery to her. She was aware that she was under the protection of a distinguished guardian – a Fellow of the Royal Society – but, although they corresponded, it seems that they did not meet. She did not learn the identity of her protector until 1848, when she was eighteen.³² Richard Sheepshanks was impressed with the progress made by his daughter, and he was anxious that it should continue. But perhaps not at Dieppe. The year 1848 was one of turmoil and revolution throughout Europe. The French once again overthrew their monarch, the unfortunate Louis Philippe. He fled to England and many English residents in France made the same trip. Anti-British sentiment was rife. Richard took the precaution of arranging for Nelly to leave Dieppe to finish her education in the pretty little Baltic town of Altona near the mouth of the river Elbe. Altona was nominally a Danish town, part of the Danish-controlled duchy of Holstein. But it was just across the river from Hamburg and had strong links with the German states.

Richard Sheepshanks knew the town well because it had a famous observatory, renowned for producing the clearest and most accurate astronomical tables. For many years it had been under the directorship of his close friend, Heinrich Schumacher. Schumacher was an astronomer of international standing, a member of the Royal Society in London, and the editor of Astronomische Nachrichten, the principal journal in the field.³³ And it was with Professor Schumacher and his family that Nelly was sent to stay. The events of 1848 had not been without their effect on the Schumachers. Hostilities had also erupted between Denmark and Prussia over the disputed territory of Holstein, and while the conflict continued the professor’s salary was not paid. Richard Sheepshanks was happy to think that Nelly’s board-and-lodging expenses would contribute to the family coffers. The professor undertook to see to her education, while his wife, his daughter, and the widow of his son, promised to make her welcome.³⁴

Initially, Nelly’s position in the household was slightly ambiguous. Richard had intimated to Professor Schumacher that, although Nelly was his ‘ward’, she would ‘not improbably’ have to make her own way in the world – perhaps as a governess, that established refuge for portionless but educated Victorian girls.³⁵ Certainly Richard Sheepshanks’ hopes for his ward’s education suggested such a path. He wanted her to study music and drawing, as well as learning German and mathematics and perhaps even some Latin. But he repeatedly stressed that ‘Nelly’ was to be shown no special consideration,³⁶ and that if she could be made use of ‘as nurse, amanuensis, housemaid, or [in] any other capacity’ it would be ‘the best education she could have’.³⁷

Such promptings were unnecessary. Nelly had a generous and helpful disposition. She speedily endeared herself to the Schumachers through her acts of kindness and her expressions of gratitude. She also proved a ready pupil. She learnt, as she put it, ‘to sing very well and to paint very badly. She devoted herself to embroidery and fine sewing. She revealed a gift for languages, learning to speak German ‘like a native’.³⁸ She also picked up Italian and Danish, though it is not known whether Professor Schumacher found time to teach her any Latin. (He had replied facetiously to Richard Sheepshanks’ suggestion that he might give Nelly some classical education with the French verse: ‘Soleil qui luit le matin,/Enfant qui boit du vin,/Femme qui sait le Latin/Ne viennent jamais a bonne fin.’^*39)

The Revd Richard Sheepshanks corresponded regularly with both Nelly and Professor Schumacher and was encouraged by news of her progress. He was able to confirm this good impression when he visited Altona in October 1849. Over the previous year his plans for his ward’s future seem to have grown and developed. And it was perhaps during, or immediately after, this visit that he revealed to Nelly his true position and declared his intention of formally recognizing her as his child. She preserved always, as the one scrap of writing in his hand, a passage from the letter in which he revealed to her his fatherhood: ‘Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you.’⁴⁰ The scrap is undated, but there is a detectable shift in Richard’s attitude to Nelly after that October; references to her are more open and more openly affectionate; and his letters end with expressions of ‘best love’.⁴¹

If Nelly’s knowledge of modern languages grew chez Schumacher so did her sense of fun and her sense of life’s possibilities. It was a convivial household in a convivial town, and she was surrounded by people of her own age. Altona had a sizeable English population and Nelly formed several long-lasting friendships. There were frequent picnics, concerts, operas, even balls. She made excursions into Italy and Austria.⁴² This round of diversion was interrupted at the end of 1850 by Professor Schumacher’s sudden illness and scarcely less sudden death.⁴³ Nelly, however, had become part of the family by this stage. There was no suggestion that she should leave. She stayed on in the Schumacher household, a companion to the grieving family.

Perhaps it was this family tragedy that introduced her to Professor Schumacher’s son, Johannes.⁴⁴ He was the artistic member of the family and had been away, studying painting in Rome. He immediately established a rapport with the family’s English houseguest, a rapport that deepened the following summer when Nelly nursed him through a bout of illness. She shared his love of Nature, and his enjoyment of climbing mountains. He admired her singing.⁴⁵ In tandem with his friendship for Nelly, Johannes also developed a close tie with her guardian. Missing his own father, he took to writing to Richard Sheepshanks, seeking his advice, his encouragement and assistance. He even visited him in London in the autumn of 1852. Early in the following year, Johannes wrote from Italy declaring that he planned to leave Rome to continue his studies in Paris. For a painter, he declared, Paris was the place to learn.⁴⁶

It was the common cry across the art schools of Europe at the time. Italy might boast the treasures of antiquity and the Renaissance, and the great German academies at Munich, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Dresden could offer a thorough practical training; but the French capital had the glamour of innovation and even revolt. It was there that the new spirit of ‘Realism’ was asserting itself with most force: at the Salon of 1850, Gustave Courbet had struck a new note with his monumental canvas The Stonebreakers. The depiction of the contemporary working man on the heroic scale of antiquity caused a sensation that others were keen to experience and to echo. Students gravitated to Paris from all over Europe and America, to throng the ateliers of Troyan, Gleyre, Couture, and Lecoq de Boisbaudran, hangar-like studios bristling with easels, plaster-casts and ambitions. Johannes Schumacher was not the only son of Altona to be drawn to Paris. He found several others already there. Amongst his confrères was an earnest young art student called Oswald Adalbert Sickert.

Oswald Sickert belonged to Altona’s artistic elite. His father, the dashing fair-haired, blond-bearded Johann Jürgen Sickert, was a pillar of the cultural community: an artist, wit, and dandy who – despite his Nordic colouring – was known to at least some of his friends by the Italianate nickname, ‘Sickarto’.⁴⁷ The son of a long line of Flensborg fishermen, he had trained as a ‘decorative painter’ and was – at least according to his grandson – for a while the ‘head of a firm of decorators who were employed in the royal palaces of Christian VIII of Denmark’.⁴⁸ He became, in time, an accomplished landscape painter, and after moving to Altona in the late 1820s was a leading member of the town’s exhibiting society. He showed there regularly, and also at the neighbouring Hamburg Kunstverein.⁴⁹ He was interested in technical innovations and was a pioneer of both lithography and photography. In 1850 the local directories list his address – at 34 Blücherstrasse – as a ‘studio of Daguerreotype’.^*50

Nevertheless, he did not abandon his first calling. He continued to undertake decorative commissions: the museum in the town still contains a painted ‘overdoor’ by him of a woman with flowers. In 1855 – at the request of the municipality – he drew up a scheme for providing art training for the town’s artisans through ‘Sunday Continuation classes’. In it he emphasized the practical benefits and applications of art, insisting on a thorough grounding in geometry and perspective. He considered that it would be ‘of more use to a carpenter, a turner or a smith, if his lessons enable him to draw a vase or an ornament correctly, than if his schooling results in nothing more than the adornment of his bedroom with a few trophies’.⁵¹ But if Johann Jürgen thought that art could be useful he also believed that the artist’s life should be fun. He was a great promoter of artistic conviviality – a composer of drinking songs and comic verses, and a leading light in the Altona dining society known as the ‘Namenlosen’ or the ‘Unnamed’, all the members of which were designated only by numbers.⁵²

Having been widowed in 1838 (when Oswald was only ten), Johann Jürgen seems to have done everything to encourage his only child’s artistic career. The young Oswald Adalbert showed precocious ability. In 1844, at the age of sixteen, he won a travelling scholarship to Copenhagen to study at the art academy. Once there, he revealed an independent spirit, abandoning the school’s classes after his first term and taking private tuition in ‘perspective drawing’ from the foremost Danish painter of the day, C. W. Eckersberg. He then devoted himself to working in the cast gallery for the whole of the following year. In 1846 he abandoned Denmark for the altogether more prestigious Academy at Munich.⁵³

Oswald Sickert stayed in the Bavarian capital for the next six years, submitting himself to the rigours of the Germanic training system. He was supported by his father, who visited him on at least one occasion and encouraged him with regular letters. Each epistle ended, ‘somewhat … to his son’s irritation’, with the imprecation – the distilled essence of old Johann Jürgen Sickert’s artistic wisdom – ‘male gut und schnell’ (paint well – paint quickly).⁵⁴ But Munich for all its virtues and opportunities had one great limitation: it was not Paris. The main drama, it was felt, was happening elsewhere. The students of Munich were alive to the new currents in French art; and in 1851 they even got a chance to view some of Courbet’s work at first hand when he exhibited in Munich, and perhaps even visited the city.⁵⁵ Oswald Sickert and his companions soon came to idolize this new master.⁵⁶ And the impact of his work prompted many of them to move to the French capital. In 1852 Oswald Sickert joined the exodus, enrolling at the Parisian teaching-studio of Thomas Couture.⁵⁷

Couture was, and remains, famous for his depictions of Classical Rome. His monumental canvas, Romans of the Decadence, was the cynosure of the 1847 Salon and was bought by the Louvre. But despite his antique themes, he allied himself closely to the contemporary strains of artistic Realism. His depiction of the dissolute Romans had been intended – and taken – as a comment on the corruption of France under Louis Philippe’s rule. He retained a reputation as a radical and independent spirit and his studio was regarded as one of the most exciting in Paris. It attracted students from all over Europe, and from America too. They found Couture’s regime both liberating and challenging. His manner had a bracing informality, very different from that of other teachers. He startled more than one student with such direct criticisms as, ‘That’s horrid! If you can’t do better than that you had better stop!’⁵⁸

Although he worked within the framework of tradition – the ‘good tradition’ of la bonne peinture that Sickert later described as being ‘sedulously nursed’ in that Paris of the 1850s – Couture was always open to the possibilities of new techniques and procedures.⁵⁹ To young artists like Oswald Sickert who arrived from the rigorously exacting art academies of Germany, such an approach was electrifying. One young artist who came to Paris from Düsseldorf considered Couture’s teaching ‘a sublime reaction from the dry-as-dust German painting then in vogue’.⁶⁰ Another thanked Couture for freeing him from ‘the niggling technique of the Germans’ as well as opening up his compositions to a much ‘broader vision & conception’.⁶¹ It was Paris that liberated Oswald Sickert. And although he was there a relatively short time (barely a year) it was, for him, a defining artistic experience: he came to regard himself as ‘more an antique Parisian than a Dane’ – or, indeed, a Bavarian.⁶²

But of course, as in most educational establishments, it was the other students – and the place itself – that provided the real education. Oswald Sickert found himself in an exciting milieu. In Paris he had the chance to see more of Courbet’s pictures.⁶³ He travelled in France, and discovered Dieppe as a sketching ground.⁶⁴ He mixed with art students not only from Couture’s atelier but from the other studios as well. There was a strong Munich contingent, including Wilhelm Füssli, Moritz Delft and Cesar Willich, as well as others from Altona, including – from 1853 – Johannes Schumacher.⁶⁵

It was Schumacher who, on one of their return visits to Altona, introduced the 24-year-old Oswald Sickert to the family houseguest, Eleanor Henry.⁶⁶ The Eleanor he met was an accomplished young woman of twenty-two, vivacious, attractive, and with beautiful fair hair. Oswald Sickert, for his part, was touched with the metropolitan glamour of Paris. He had a fine beard and, despite a retiring manner, seems to have been considered rather a dashing figure by the young ladies of Altona. (Preserved amongst his papers is one letter from an admirer – not Eleanor Henry – who addressed him with more poetic ardour than geo-political exactness as ‘Dear German Lord Byron’.⁶⁷) It was not, however, his romantic looks, nor even his fledgling artistic reputation, that seems to have drawn Eleanor Henry to him. It was music. They shared a common passion. Oswald Sickert played the piano with real sensitivity and skill. According to one exacting critic, his ‘technique was faulty, but his phrasing was musicianly, and … for passion and for singing quality in cantabile passages he excelled many public performers’. He had a strong sense of rhythm and was a ‘brilliant’ sight-reader.⁶⁸ Eleanor, the dancer’s daughter, had her own sense of rhythm and allied it to a beautiful singing voice. Their romance flourished to an accompaniment of Schubert lieder.

Even amongst the romantically inclined young people of Altona, however, it was recognized that Eleanor’s social position was problematic. Although the exact details of her background remained vague, it had become known that she was illegitimate. This, to the conventional mid nineteenth-century mind, was an all-but-ineradicable stain, a bar to any full social acceptance. But to the young Oswald Sickert, brought up in the world of art, schooled in the studios of Copenhagen, Munich, and Paris, such considerations counted for little besides the more real attractions of Eleanor’s character and person.⁶⁹ He was happy to overlook the supposed taint.^*

Oswald was more concerned that Eleanor’s guardian might not favour the suit of an as yet unknown Danish artist for the hand of his ward. There were, however, encouraging signs. Johannes Schumacher – himself quite as unknown as Oswald Sickert – had fallen in love with another member of Altona’s international colony, an English girl called Annie Williams. He wanted to propose to her but had received no encouragement from Mr Williams, who insisted that Johannes first prove he was capable of supporting a wife. Johannes had sought Richard Sheepshanks’ advice on the matter and had been much heartened by his tone of encouragement. It was a tone backed up with practical assistance. Sheepshanks commissioned a picture from his young friend and sent him a cheque for £100.⁷⁰ This positive attitude towards the romance of one impecunious painter and an English girl with prospects must have given Oswald Sickert some small grounds for optimism.

That optimism was soon tested. In the summer of 1855, Richard Sheepshanks announced that he wished to take Eleanor on a tour of France and Italy. They would travel together with his sister Anne. Eleanor, however, was to meet her father at once in Paris. It was the news of her imminent departure from Altona that precipitated Oswald Sickert to declare his love. He proposed and was accepted. Eleanor was touched not only by the earnestness of his suit but by his willingness to overlook her doubtful status. Nevertheless, she must have had some doubts about how her father would take the news. The engagement was not disclosed. She travelled to France with it as a secret.⁷¹

The reunion with her father in Paris was a happy and exciting one. Plans for the trip were discussed and, while they waited for Anne to arrive, Richard took Eleanor around the shops to equip her with a new wardrobe. They bought dresses, and lace, and jewellery. In this congenial atmosphere of confidence and acceptance, Eleanor relaxed. She confided the secret of her engagement to her father. The effect was devastating. He ordered her to break the attachment. When she declined, he became furious. Eleanor was reduced to tears but refused to yield. Richard, behaving in the manner traditional to irate parents, cancelled the proposed European holiday. He refused to allow Eleanor to return to Altona but sent her back instead to lodge with Mrs Slee at Dieppe. Although at twenty-four she would have been more a staff member than a pupil, the ignominy of her abrupt return, the exchange of the gay whirl of Altona for the institutionalized tedium of a Dieppoise boarding school (even one as sympathetic as Mrs Slee’s), and the separation both from her beloved fiance and her new-found father, must have been painful.⁷²

The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks, ignoring any counsels of clemency, went back to England. By post he continued to rain down further reproaches upon Eleanor, until – on 29 July – he was struck down by a sudden paralysis. After lying for a week unable to talk or move, he died at his house in Reading. He was just sixty. Eleanor blamed herself. Away in Dieppe, she was convinced that it was her untimely announcement of her engagement that had precipitated the stroke. Medical opinion took a different view, while Richard’s friends were convinced that he had overstrained his constitution with his work on the Standard Yard. But such notions, if they reached Neuville, did little to console the distressed Nelly.⁷³

Richard Sheepshanks had, at the time he first revealed his parentage, planned to alter his will in order to make provision for Eleanor. But he died before he did so. His sister Anne was his sole legatee. She had managed his affairs and shared his interests throughout his life, and she now readily took up the burden of his responsibilities. Eleanor became her charge. Miss Sheepshanks, unlike her brother, was not implacably opposed to Oswald Sickert’s suit – although she perhaps felt that it should be tested by the trials of time and distance. At any event, she arranged for Eleanor, after she had recovered from the shock of the moment, to go as a parlour-boarder to a ‘first-class’ school in Paris; and by 1857 she had found her a post as resident governess to the two daughters of George Harris, a Harrow schoolmaster, with a salary of £100 a year.⁷⁴

Oswald Sickert, meanwhile, did not lose heart. He kept in touch with Eleanor and he persevered with his painting. There were modest successes. His scenes of contemporary agricultural life seem to have combined a fashionable ‘Realismus’ with a traditional German taste for landscape.⁷⁵ He had a picture accepted by the Berlin Academy in 1856, and the following year he showed at the Kiel Kunsthalle, where the ‘fluent tone’ and ‘mood’ of his work was praised.⁷⁶ Also in 1857 he exhibited a picture at the British Institute in London, and it is probable that he came over to see it, and Eleanor.⁷⁷ He was dividing his time between Altona and Munich.⁷⁸ He worked hard and his career advanced – but at a frustratingly slow pace. The market was crowded and sales were hard to get.

Eventually, he was obliged to compromise. In a bid to prove his ability to support a wife he returned to Munich and took a job on the Fliegende Blätter, a periodical noted for its comic illustrations. Many of Germany’s leading draughtsmen contributed to the weekly’s pages, but there was also much unsigned hackwork, and this is what Oswald Sickert was hired to provide.⁷⁹ It is not likely that the work was very remunerative, but it does seem to have convinced Anne Sheepshanks of the suitor’s earnestness and capability. The marriage was allowed to go forward.

Oswald Sickert travelled from Munich to claim his bride. During the years of trial his ardour had remained undimmed. As Eleanor confided happily to one of her friends, he loved her ‘with all the strength of a reserved nature concentrated to love one object’.⁸⁰ The wedding took place in the parish church at Harrow on 3 August 1859. Eleanor was resplendent in a gown of white striped silk. She had no fewer than five bridesmaids, including her two young pupils. Mr Harris gave her away,⁸¹ and Mrs Slee came over from Dieppe for the occasion.⁸² Although there is no record of Anne Sheepshanks’ attendance at the ceremony, she certainly gave her blessing to it. She also gave Eleanor an allowance with which to start out on married life.⁸³

The honeymoon took the newly-weds through Belgium to Düsseldorf, on to the picturesque lake at Königswasser, and thence to Munich. There the young couple installed themselves in a small flat at 16 Schwantalestrasse. Eleanor brought with her little more than her beautiful wedding dress, her ‘Paris trousseau’, and a desire to make a happy home.⁸⁴ They had little furniture beyond a bed and a piano; but that was probably all that they needed.⁸⁵ It was certainly convenient; leases tended to be short in Munich and the Sickerts moved flat three times over the next four years.⁸⁶

The Munich in which they established themselves was a thriving if rather pretentious little town, with a population of some 130,000. Although medieval in origin, it was very much a modern city, exuding a sense of newness, freshness, and cleanliness. Many of the recently built houses had little front gardens, and many of the streets were lined with trees. Munich was self-consciously proud to be the capital of Bavaria, and the home of its royal house. The Wittelsbach monarchs – the recently abdicated Ludwig I and the reigning Maximilian II – had conceived the city as a centre of culture and style. They had laid out broad avenues and spacious parks. They had erected a succession of mock-classical and mock-Renaissance buildings to complement the few pre-existing Gothic and baroque churches. The Wittelsbachs had also established important collections of art – the classical sculptures of the Glyptotech, the old masters of the Kunstmuseum, and the new masters of the Neukunst Museum. Munich was full of ‘new masters’, or would-be new masters. The numerous major building projects, the prospects of royal patronage, and the high quality (as much as the low price) of the Bavarian beer, made Munich a focus for painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, and artists of every sort and every nationality.

There were, according to one resident writing at the beginning of the 1860s, ‘about a thousand artists in Munich’. They constituted a distinct and lively social group. They were noted for their conviviality, their ‘love of amusement and pageant’.⁸⁷ They ‘congregated and made merry with cheap Künstlerfesten’, some more formal than others.⁸⁸ Every few years they would arrange an elaborate ‘costume ball’, taking over the main rooms of the Odeum and transforming them with fantastical decorations, before transforming themselves with no less fantastical costumes. Each spring the artists would decamp en masse to the wooded hills south of the city to celebrate a May-fest with dining, dancing, and revelling. Nor was it just artists who were drawn to Munich. The low cost of living in Bavaria encouraged a sizeable contingent of foreigners, and particularly of English people, to settle in the city. Food was inexpensive; there were no rates; and servants were easy to come by. In 1860 a fixed sterling income went further in Munich than in almost any other capital in Europe.

The cosmopolitan and artistic ambience of the city ensured that Eleanor felt none of the isolation that removal to a new and foreign world might have otherwise entailed. She found two supportive groups ready to welcome her: the artists and the English. Oswald Sickert’s long connection with Munich had given him a place near the heart of the city’s artistic community. Despite his commitments to the Fliegende Blätter, he continued to produce his own work as well, and to exhibit it at the Munich Kunstverein.⁸⁹ He had many artist friends (Füssli and Willich had returned to the city from Paris); and Eleanor, with her knowledge of German, was able to welcome them, first at Schwanthalestrasse and then at a new flat in Augustenstrasse. There were English artists, too, in Munich, and many of these were drawn into the Sickerts’ convivial circle, along with other less artistic compatriots. Although there was an English ‘Minister Plenipotentiary’ at the Bavarian court,⁹⁰ the main focus for the expatriate community was provided by the Anglican chaplaincy. There was at that time no actual church, but the congregation gathered for services each Sunday either at one of the new hotels or in a room at the Odeum.⁹¹

It was there that the Sickerts had their first-born child christened, barely a year after their arrival at Munich.⁹² Anne Sheepshanks, though she does not appear to have come over for the ceremony, agreed to stand as godmother to the young Walter Richard. And she must have been glad that the memory of her beloved brother was preserved in the boy’s middle name. For Eleanor, the choice may have served in part as an expiation of the lingering guilt and remorse that she felt over her (imagined) part in hastening Richard’s end. It was also an acknowledgement (and perhaps a projection) of the link between the Sickerts and their wealthy relatives. Walter was brought up with a lively sense of his maternal grandfather’s importance: the ‘89,500 micrometer observations’ that he made in the cellars of Somerset House became part of the family folklore.⁹³

The infant Walter Richard was an adored first child. His name was instantly familiarized to ‘Wat’. His birth precipitated a move to a first-floor flat at 25 Blumenstrasse. Perhaps there was more room at the new address. There certainly needed to be. Mr and Mrs Sickert – both only, and lonely, children – seem to have been determined to create the full and happy family life that they had never known. Barely eighteen months after Walter’s arrival a second child was born, christened Robert. And only a year after that, a third son. Following the tradition of choosing names that worked both in English and German, he was called Bernard or, more Teutonically, Bernhard.^* So brisk was the succession of infants that Bernhard had to be suckled by a wet nurse.⁹⁴

The advent of siblings did nothing to dilute the infant Walter’s power and position. He was very much the eldest child. As a toddler he was precocious, winning, and lovely to look at. Eleanor, in later years, ‘never wearied of telling about his beauty and his perfect behaviour as a baby’ – rather to the irritation and surprise of his younger siblings who knew him as a less docile (though still beautiful) child.⁹⁵ He had, too, a natural gift for self-dramatization. Even at the age of three his sudden entrance into the family sitting room one evening was so arresting that his parents’ friend Füssli, who was visiting, insisted on painting him. The picture – a life-size representation of the very young Walter holding an apple while clad only in a short nightshift, his huge mop of flaxen curls surrounding a ‘rosy face and solemn blue eyes’ – was in due course presented to the family and prominently hung in the living room. Walter grew up under this quasi-heroic image of himself. In later years he would describe it as his ‘first appearance on any stage as Hamlet’. It was clear that, even at the age of three, he had a desire to play the title role.⁹⁶

The picture must also have served as a reminder of his everchanging appearance. The following year he effected the first of what would be many dramatic transformations. Or rather it was effected for him. ‘Wat’s head looks like a broom,’ his mother wrote, ‘now that the long curls are off.’ The short crop was perhaps well suited to his physique and temperament. ‘He is an immense fellow,’ his mother declared proudly, ‘taller and broader than the generality of boys at his age’, though she did admit that he had still ‘such a baby face’. This cherubic face, it was noted, masked a fearsome will: ‘He is very perverse and wayward, and wants a very tight hand.’ Too much ‘tenderness’ enabled him ‘to give way to his temper’.⁹⁷ The tight hand, however, was one that only Eleanor could employ. Later in the same year she was remarking, Walter is not very easy to leave with the servants, I can make him mind without much trouble. With them He is master.’⁹⁸ There was, however, no doubting his intelligence. He delighted in books, and with only the minimum of parental encouragement taught himself to read and write before he was four.⁹⁹

In 1864, King Maximilian died and was succeeded by his son, the Wagner-loving eccentric Ludwig II – someone more ‘perverse and wayward’ than even the 4-year-old Walter Sickert. At almost the same moment, Mrs Sickert gave birth to a fourth child, a girl, christened Helena but known (like her mother) as Nellie. The ever-expanding young family moved once again, to a flat on the first floor at No. 4 Kleestrasse.¹⁰⁰ This new address became the Sickerts’ most longstanding Munich home. It was set in a short cross-street running between the Bayerstrasse and the Schwanthalestrasse, close to the large park-cum-showground, the Theresienwiese, where the city’s annual Oktoberfest was held. Comforts were rather sparse. If there were no rates to pay on the flat, it was because no services were provided. There was no piped gas, no running water, and, of course, no water closet. There was, however, a maid to help with fetching and carrying, with getting wood for the fires, and water for the basins.

Life in the new flat was crowded, even cramped, but happy. Although there were regular excursions to the shops, to the Botanical Gardens (to feed the fish) and to the Theresienwiese (to roll on the grass), the whole family spent much of each day indoors. There was no nurse and no nursery. Eleanor sat, looking over the four young children in the living room, sewing and mending, while Oswald worked in a small adjoining studio room.¹⁰¹ Mrs Sickert was blessed with the rare ‘health and energy and courage’ necessary to bring up a large family on a small income. Food, she made sure, was always plentiful and nourishing, if simple – very simple. Jam was a rare event; sweets a once-a-year Christmas treat. Even birthdays were marked only with ‘plain cake’. The Sickerts adopted the Bavarian custom of having their main meal at midday. A rather frugal ‘tea’ of bread, butter, and milk, eaten at six, represented the children’s evening meal. The parents had a later but scarcely less frugal supper.¹⁰² Bread, rice, potatoes, oats and sago were the abundant staples of the Sickert table. They were often combined with the notoriously thin Bavarian milk into what the family called ‘pluffy puddings’.^* It was a regimen of unexampled blandness which goes some way to explaining Walter’s later relish for the good things of French, Italian, and even British cuisine. Nevertheless, throughout his life, at times of crisis he would seek solace in the comforting familiarity of rice pudding or bread-and-milk.

Mrs Sickert was what her daughter called ‘an admirable baby mother’, with a real love of young children and a real gift for keeping them occupied, amused, and in order.¹⁰³ Under her direction, Walter and his siblings devised their own entertainments. There was little money for toys, and it was thought better that they should make their own. Their mother’s workbasket was the principal source of materials, as they constructed miniature box carts with cotton-reel wheels, or transformed wooden button moulds into spinning tops. Their father’s old cigar boxes became ‘blocks of flats’, fitted out with acorn furniture. There was, however, a constant danger that the play – invariably led by Walter – would grow wild. Oswald Sickert was not a natural ‘baby father’. He had a ‘highly nervous’ temperament and found the stress of weekly deadlines and daily distractions hard to endure. Sometimes he would startle the children by bursting into the living room, interrupting their games with a despairing plea, ‘Can’t you keep these children quieter?’ He would, as Helena recalled, immediately regret the outburst; his wife ‘had only to turn reproachful eyes on him to bring his arms round her and a tender plea for forgiveness. Then he would steal away and we would look guiltily at each other and behave like mice.’¹⁰⁴ But even without such irruptions, the children’s spells of furious practical activity alternated with ‘periods of silent contemplation’. Walter might take up a book. He was a voracious reader throughout his childhood.¹⁰⁵ And Mrs Sickert would sometimes lay the flat tin top of the travelling bath on the floor and say it was a raft, on which the children would clamber aboard and ‘drift away on dim voyages’ of the mind.¹⁰⁶

It was a cultured home. Music played a large part in family life. Mrs Sickert sang constantly at her work as she watched over her brood. Most evenings she and Oswald would make music together, Oswald accompanying her as she sang, and then playing on for ‘an hour or so’ on his own. Beethoven and Schumann were favourites.¹⁰⁷ In the Munich of Ludwig II it was impossible to escape entirely from the music of Wagner. His operas were performed frequently at the Hoftheater, breaking up the more conventional repertoire of Meyerbeer, Mozart, Halévy, Weber, and Rossini.¹⁰⁸ Mr and Mrs Sickert went. Eleanor felt that perhaps one Wagner opera was enough.¹⁰⁹ Oswald, however, was more intrigued. When the ‘Ring Cycle’ was published and a friend brought round the full orchestral score of the four operas, Oswald, in a bravura display of sight-reading, played it straight through, adapting the music to the piano as he went along, the friend scurrying ahead, turning the pages as fast as he could.¹¹⁰

Although the infant Walter listened with interest to the talk about Wagner and the ‘mad king’, and enjoyed the constant flow of music and song that ran through 4 Kleestrasse, there remained a certain distance to his appreciation. Unlike his younger siblings – particularly Bernhard – he had ‘no musical gift at all’ and was not able even to ‘sing true’.¹¹¹ He showed a more ready aptitude for the household’s other main preoccupation: art. The evidences of Oswald Sickert’s profession were all around the flat. And although his studio room may have been sacrosanct, his paintings were on view, as were works by his father and by his friends. His artist confrères were constant visitors. Füssli, besides painting the 3-year-old Walter, executed a ‘charming’ Ingres-like portrait of Mrs Sickert in her black moiré-antique dress with white lace collar, her hair framing her face in ‘smooth shining rolls’.¹¹² Surrounded by such examples it was not surprising that the ‘chief pleasure’ of Walter – and of his brothers – was ‘painting, drawing and modelling in wax’.¹¹³ More time was spent in artistic endeavour than in anything else. Almost none of Walter’s puerile production has survived. There is, however, nothing to suggest he was a prodigy. Nevertheless, even at five it seems that, unlike the vast majority of children, he was more concerned to record what he saw, rather than to escape into the realms of the imagination. Mrs Sickert sent one friend a ‘rather crude drawing’ by the 5-year-old Walter of Helena as a babe in arms.¹¹⁴

Mrs Sickert was ‘at home’ at Kleestrasse on Thursday afternoons, and often received visitors.¹¹⁵ The growth of the family enhanced rather than diminished the Sickerts’ thriving social life. There were several other families with young children who gravitated towards them. Eleanor was befriended by the Edward Wilberforces, a young couple who had one son the same age as Robert and another christened only three weeks after Helena. Edward Wilberforce had left the Navy after getting married (to an American with the arresting name of Fannie Flash) and was preparing for a career at the Bar. He had devoted his time in Munich to writing an entertaining and opinionated book on the life of the town.¹¹⁶ Although there was no ‘English Doctor’ in Munich, Dr Heinrich von Ranke (grand-nephew of the great historian), who had a practice in Carlstrasse, was a keen Anglophile who spoke excellent English.¹¹⁷ A specialist in treating children, he became the Sickerts’ family doctor and a good friend. Dr Ranke was mildly eccentric, full of ‘German fun’ and fond of practical jokes; his tiny wife was – like Oswald Sickert – a ‘Schleswig-Dane’ and – like Eleanor – the daughter of an English astronomer.¹¹⁸ They too had a bevy of young children, playmates for the infant Sickerts.¹¹⁹

Shortly after the Sickerts’ move to Kleestrasse, Johann Jürgen Sickert came down from Altona to visit the family in their new home and to see his grandchildren. He was only sixty-one and it was a surprise when, not long after his return home, he died. He was found early one morning at his studio, dead in his chair, in front of his easel.¹²⁰ Oswald Sickert had to go and sort out his affairs. He discovered his native town in a curious and unhappy condition. In the summer of 1864 the Prussians, together with the Austrians, had engineered another quarrel with Denmark. It had led to a very brief military confrontation in which the Prusso-Austrian alliance had comprehensively defeated the Danes. The spoils of their victory were the longdisputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Altona and its citizens had ceased to be subject to the Danish crown. Oswald Sickert – like his father (and his son) – was neither political nor nationalist. Art and music were his concerns. During his long residence in Munich he had come to regard himself as a Bavarian-German of liberal tendencies.¹²¹ But the unrest of war and the clear signs of Prussia’s military ambitions in Europe were unsettling. Back in Munich, Eleanor announced that she was ‘growing fidgety’.¹²²

It was also an unsettling time for the young Walter. Eleanor was becoming increasingly alarmed at his health: ‘Wat looks very pale and thin,’ she reported, ‘but he eats and drinks and sleeps & walks any distance.’ He could still manage a trip to the Botanical Gardens to feed the ducks, but found it hard to concentrate for long. Even the prospect of earning a coin for learning to spell some new words was not enough to sustain his interest. He soon grew tired.¹²³ Munich was known to have a less than healthy climate. Infant deaths were common. (Eleanor was later told by Dr Ranke that she was the only mother on his books to have ‘borne four children and brought them alive out of infancy in the city’.) The ‘high bitter air’ was liable to cause bronchial problems, and indeed all the Sickert children suffered regularly from croup. Walter’s complaint, however, was of a different order. The reason for his pallor and lassitude was discovered to be some sort of intestinal blockage or abscess. This seems to have developed into an anal fistula as the body, seeking a new outlet, opened up a narrow channel between the lower part of the rectum and the skin around the anus. An operation became necessary to close up the wound, and restore the natural channel. It was a problematic business. The fistula was kept from healing by the constant entrance into it of material from the bowel. The first attempt by the Munich doctors was unsuccessful. And so was the second. By the middle of 1865, Walter was still suffering.¹²⁴

That summer, Eleanor took the family to Dieppe. It was a punishing journey to make with four small children, in a train without lavatory compartments or buffet car.¹²⁵ But the town held such a special place in her affections that she wanted to introduce her offspring to its charms – to the old streets, the castle on its cliff, the Gothic churches of St Jacques and St Remy, to the quaint onion-domed Casino, the long pebbly beach, the bracing northern sea, to the school house on the slopes of Neuville that had been her youthful home; and – of course – to Mrs Slee and her daughters. It was Walter’s first experience to a town that would become at different times his home, his refuge, and his inspiration.

It was also his first introduction to his godmother. Anne Sheepshanks came over from England, full of kind thoughts and offers of practical help. Her first scheme of assistance was to increase and formalize the allowance that she made to Eleanor and establish it under a trust.^* Her second concern was Walter’s health. After the failure of the two Munich operations, she believed that nothing short of a London specialist would suffice. The acknowledged centre for rectal surgery was St Mark’s Hospital, in London’s City Road, and it was arranged that Oswald Sickert would bring Walter over to London in October. As Miss Sheepshanks no longer had a house in town, she rented one – at Duncan Terrace, Islington – close to the hospital.¹²⁶

The expedition, following directly upon the holiday at Dieppe, gave Walter a foretaste of another of his future motifs. It was, however, the drama of the operation, and his central part in that drama, rather than Islington’s well-proportioned Georgian terraces, that seems to have impressed him most. It became another of the key points in his personal mythology. ‘Islington,’ he liked to claim in later years, ‘has always been kind to me. My life was saved at the age of five … [at] St Mark’s Hospital in the City Road.’ He was proud of the fact that the operation was carried out by Alfred Cooper – then the hospital’s Assistant Surgeon, but later a VD specialist and then a knight (and finally the father-in-law of Lady Diana Cooper).¹²⁷ After the operation Walter and his father stayed on at Duncan Terrace for three weeks.¹²⁸ It was an experience that sharpened Walter’s keen sense of his own separateness, and specialness, within the family. By November, however, they were back at Kleestrasse ready for all the excitements of a Bavarian winter.

It was the season when Munich came into its own. One of Sickert’s abiding childhood memories was of the city in its Christmas finery: dusted with powdery snow; Christmas trees standing on the street corners; and the darkness of the cobbled Dultplatz aglitter with gaily illumined street stalls dispensing such seasonal delicacies as gilt gingerbread and sugar effigies of the Baby Jesus – delicacies which, for once, he was allowed to enjoy. As an adult he sometimes wished that he might be five years old again so that he could experience the thrill of it all afresh.¹²⁹ The informal drama of the Christmas streets found an echo in more conventional performances too. Another cherished recollection was of a visit to the circus, when a troop of elephants had been ridden round the ring by marmosets in fancy Zouave costumes.¹³⁰ It was a first memorable taste of the popular theatre.

But, aside from these festive moments, Munich seems to have left remarkably little impress upon Sickert’s infant mind. In later life he spoke of it rarely, and never with enthusiasm. Although he was so responsive to the poetry of other places, Munich’s broad avenues and mongrel buildings did not excite him. Its treasures remained unknown: the fashion for taking very young children around art galleries had not begun. He could not escape Otto Klenze’s colossal statue of ‘Bavaria’ – represented as a sixty-foot-high bronze female holding a wreath above her head – which dominated the Theresienwiese, but it failed to impress him. Commissioned by Ludwig I, it was – Sickert claimed in later years – one of the things that first convinced him of the folly of state sponsorship of the arts.¹³¹

He preferred the countryside around the town, and came to know it well. From the moment that the May-fest signalled the beginning of the summer, Munichers would flock to leave the city. The Sickerts joined this annual exodus, passing a month or two in the Bavarian countryside, lodging with peasants’ families, or staying at country inns. They would visit the little villages dotting the shore of the nearby Starnbergersee – the magnificent lake some sixteen miles long just south of Munich. Or they might venture further afield to other lakes in the Bavarian Tyrol – to the wooded shores of the Chiemsee or to the Staffelsee. In an alfresco variation of their Munich life, Oswald would sketch and paint, while Eleanor would look after the children. In the evening they would all gather in the biergarten of the inn.¹³²

There were also happy outdoor days spent with the family of the Revd Rodney Fowler, the sometime rector of Broadway in Worcestershire, who became the English chaplain at Munich in 1866. He and his wife, arriving with two daughters, aged five and two, had been at once drawn into the Sickerts’ circle.¹³³ The Sickerts also paid visits to Laufzorn, the Rankes’ country house. The place, a former hunting lodge of the kings of Bavaria, was supposedly haunted, which may have added to the excitement of the visits.¹³⁴ But the main pleasure for the children was in playing in the huge echoing banqueting room, which contained an improvised swing – a long plank on which several children could sit astride while it was swung, fearfully, lengthways. As Helena recalled, ‘Every child had to cling tightly to the one in front and the exercise was performed to a chorus of “Hutsche-Kutscher-Genung!” the last word being shouted as loud and as long as possible.’ There was also a big hay barn where the children could jump from the rafters into the hay below.¹³⁵

Walter delighted in such games and in such company. He was extremely sociable and made friends easily.¹³⁶ Surrounded by boys at home, he seems to have enjoyed being surrounded by girls elsewhere. At the age of six he had managed to become engaged both to one of Dr Ranke’s daughters and to the eldest of Mr Fowler’s girls. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he remarked, when looking back on the arrangement, ‘that there was any inconsistency.’ It was an attitude of mind that he preserved in his relations with the female sex throughout his life.¹³⁷

The Bavarian summers were months of almost idyllic pleasure for the children. It was in the Starnbergersee that Walter discovered the delights of swimming, and there, too, that he learnt to fish.¹³⁸ Initially, he had merely tied a piece of bread to a length of string and watched the fishes nibble, but Mr Fowler, steeped in the sporting traditions of the Anglican clergy, showed him – much to Eleanor’s dismay – how to bait a hook. Death, however, seems to have intrigued Walter. One holiday game involved the construction of a miniature cemetery from pebbles and moss and twigs.¹³⁹ In Walter’s memory these summers took on the hues of a golden age. He would look back to them as a time of peace, calm, and certainty. ‘When I used to play by mill streams in Bavaria [and] listened to my mother sing the Schoener Muller of Schubert,’ he recalled, ‘I thought it would always be like that.’

The extraordinary beauty of the Bavarian countryside in early summer – the greenness of the foliage, the clearness of the light, the profusion of flowers – made a profound and lasting impression on all the Sickert children. Walter, though he became the great artist of urban life and urban architecture, retained always a flickering sense that ‘woods & lakes & brooks’ were ‘the nicest things in the world’.¹⁴⁰ It was the quality of light that made them special: the fall of broken sunshine through the overarching canopy of leaves. ‘I think,’ he declared, ‘the loveliest thing in Nature is a sous-bois.’¹⁴¹ Even as a child he sought to express his admiration in art. From the age of five he wanted to paint such verdant, sun-dappled scenes. It became one of the recurrent desires of his working life – recurrent, in part, because it was never achieved.¹⁴²

In all the Sickert children’s games and activities Walter took the lead. Although Mrs Sickert maintained a clear structure of kindly authority, she rarely attempted any interference between her offspring, and would not countenance ‘tale bearing’. It was her principle that they should all learn to live together.¹⁴³ This was a situation that rather suited Walter, who was ‘not only the eldest, but by far the cleverest’, and the most energetic of the siblings.¹⁴⁴ Robert was a fretful child, Bernhard a fractious one, and Helena too young to exert her own considerable powers.¹⁴⁵ From the outset, Walter imposed his will upon them all, getting his own way either by force of character or by guile – though he was not above climbing out of his cot in the nursery to pull his sister’s hair if he felt the occasion warranted.¹⁴⁶ But, as Helena admitted, even at this young age ‘he was able to infuse so much charm into life’, and to make ‘our pursuits so interesting’, that ‘we were generally his willing slaves’.¹⁴⁷ It became one of Mrs Sickert’s recurrent complaints that none of the siblings was able to ‘resist’ Walter, an indication – as Helena noted – that not all his activities were agreeable to authority. Walter, however, was a fickle leader, with no sense of responsibility to his followers. His restless intelligence needed the stimulation of constant change. For his siblings, the ‘tragedy’ came – and came frequently – when ‘the magician suddenly took flight to some other adventure and the one which had seemed so entrancing, while [Walter] led it, turned to folly in the grey morning after’.¹⁴⁸

From a very young age Walter was regarded as being separate from and above his younger brothers. The phrase ‘Walter and the boys’ was a common and early family coinage.¹⁴⁹ He enjoyed a privileged position as the eldest child. In the evenings he alone was allowed to sit up with his parents, not to supper, but at the supper table.¹⁵⁰ Oswald Sickert’s long working hours and occasional absences encouraged Walter to develop a sense almost of responsibility towards his mother. In later years he would describe how, during his Munich childhood, he was ‘for many years’ her ‘only rational companion’.¹⁵¹ He alone amongst his siblings established a bond with his father. The other children were slightly frightened of ‘Papa’. It seemed that he never spoke to them unless it was to give an order or to make some disparaging comment.¹⁵² But then he did not speak very much to anyone. He was extremely taciturn and reserved by nature.¹⁵³ Walter, however, he did talk to – after his own fashion. The trip to London had fostered relations between them. Walter always held dear the memory of his father’s kindly face looking down at him as he sank under the anaesthetic before the operation – a perhaps rare intimation of tenderness from his diffident parent.¹⁵⁴ It was with Walter that Oswald Sickert took his daily walk on the Theresienwiese.¹⁵⁵ And he impressed his son with his few words. He had, as Walter recorded, ‘a wide critical comprehension’. And though he was apt to judge himself as ‘coldly as he did everything else’, there seems to have been an edge of wit to his verdicts.¹⁵⁶ Many years later, when reading Heine, Sickert was struck by the similarities between the poet’s self-deflating irony and his father’s own ‘expressions & attitude of spirit’. They came, he noted, from the same northern, Baltic world.¹⁵⁷

Even as a child, Walter was interested in his father’s work – his paintings and, more particularly, his drawings. The arrival at 4 Kleestrasse of the Fliegende Blätter on Thursday evenings at supper time was ‘an event’ in Walter’s week, and not merely because he was presented with the paper wrapper to wear as a cap. He was interested to hear his father’s comments on the reproduction of the wood engravings. And he liked to look at the pictures. Many of the images lived with him throughout his life.^* And although it was perhaps the comedy of the situations depicted that provided the initial attraction, he also imbibed an understanding of technique and an appreciation of how scenes of everyday life could be rendered in art. The quality of work in the paper was extremely high and the variety instructive. When he came to review the artistic masters of his Munich childhood Sickert singled out the work of Wilhelm Diez, Wilhelm Busch, and particularly Adolf Oberlander, whom he praised for his ‘frankness’ and his genius for rendering scenes ‘in terms of limpid light, and shade’.¹⁵⁸ The set of bound copies of the Fliegende Blätter became part of the Sickert family library and Walter had plenty of opportunities to refresh his memory and refine his knowledge of its artists, but the foundation of his appreciation and understanding was laid in his early childhood.¹⁵⁹

During the summer of 1866 the anxieties that Oswald and Eleanor had felt about the political situation in Europe were confirmed. The Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, having carefully prepared the ground, engineered a dispute with Austria as a pretext for laying claim to Holstein. In what became known as the Seven Weeks War, the Prussians decisively defeated their former allies and their associates (nine German states, including Bavaria, had sided with the Austrians). In August, a peace treaty was signed at Prague giving Prussia full control of both Schleswig and Holstein. A new German constitution was established, and it was decreed that all citizens of Schleswig-Holstein would become naturalized Prussians in October of the following year. Oswald Sickert was concerned at the effect this might have on his young family. He did not wish his sons to be liable at some future date to conscription into the Prussian army (and he was anxious, too, that they should not become what he called ‘Beer-swilling Bavarians’).¹⁶⁰ The idea of moving to England took serious hold. It was, however, an operation that required some planning.

Walter, in the meantime, began attending a local school, and his brothers soon followed him. It was a huge, impersonal place. Each class had between fifty and eighty boys, and pupils were drawn from all backgrounds. Robert found the noise and the number of boys altogether too much, but Walter remained unfazed. He got on ‘very nicely’, his mother reported: ‘He does not learn much, they do nothing but German & reckoning and these public schools are so large that the bright ones always have to keep pace with the slow ones.’¹⁶¹ Walter, in his mother’s informed – if not unbiased – opinion, was very definitely one of ‘the bright ones’.

By November 1867 the Sickerts’ plans for moving to England were well advanced. Anne Sheepshanks had given her blessing to the scheme. The Sickerts left Munich the following spring. Walter does not appear to have considered it a deracination. Although in the anti-German decades of the twentieth century he always enjoyed the shock that could be produced by announcing to an English audience that he was a ‘Münchener Kind’l’, he never thought of himself as a German or a Bavarian.¹⁶² He retained a passing enjoyment of German literature and relish for the tricks of the German language.¹⁶³ But these were surface pleasures; they left very little mark on his character. Duncan Grant, who came to know Sickert well, considered that there was ‘very little of the German’ in his make-up.¹⁶⁴ Sickert himself admitted only to having ‘a certain German quality, which is called in German sächlich – devoted to things, ideas, etc. – to the possible disadvantage of people’, a quality by which he excused his often disparaging critical comments upon the work of his friends.¹⁶⁵ But while he certainly did possess this cool, critical, northern trait, he was more likely to have inherited it from his father than to have imbibed it amidst the hurly-burly of the Munich Volksschule.

The Sickerts, on leaving Munich, did not go at once to England. They passed a long summer at Dieppe. It was a happy interlude. Walter was even enrolled briefly at the Collège du Dieppe.¹⁶⁶ He exchanged German for French. If he did not have an ear for music he had one for languages. Learning by mimicry rather than book study, his accent ran ahead of his understanding. He would pick up whole passages of French speech and recite them perfectly, convincing Frenchmen that he was a young compatriot. The disadvantage of this trick only came when they answered him and he was unable either to understand or to reply.¹⁶⁷ The experience of being lost for words was a new one to him.

^* It became the nucleus of the V&A picture collection.

^* The whole area has since been remodelled: the west side of the square has been replaced by the Brunswick Centre, a 1960s shopping and housing development.

^* ‘A sun that shines in the morning,/A child that drinks wine,/A woman who knows Latin/Never come to a good end.’

^* Sickert preserved a daguerreotype of his grandfather, sitting very still in a dressing-gown and a smoking-cap ‘calculated to turn his pious grandson green with envy’. ‘From the Life’, Morning Post (18 May 1925).

^* Though he may not have known it, he too had been born out of wedlock. His parents married in June 1828, four months after his birth.

^* On the baptismal register, Bernard’s name is spelled ‘Bernhart’, though he never seems to have used this form. Robert was given the second name ‘Oswald’, like his father.

^* ‘Milk and butter are in a state of barbarism,’ reported the travel writer Edward Wilberforce. The butter was often rancid. As to the difference between milk and cream in Munich, ‘a long experience has shown me that cream is milk with water put in it, while milk is water with milk put in it’.

^* The trust was set up on 29 June, between Mr and Mrs Sickert, Anne Sheepshanks, and three trustees, Augustus de Morgan, William Sharp, and George Campbell de Morgan (a copy is in the Sutton papers at GUL).

^* ‘I remember an illustration in the Fliegende Blätter in the early sixties in which was depicted a little girl guiding her blind grandmother. Finding the road rather even, and therefore tedious, the child from time to time feigned an obstacle, a brick or stone, and said, “Granny, jump,” which the old lady obediently did. When someone remonstrated with the child, she answered, “My grandmother is mine; I may do what I choose with her.”’ ‘The Polish Rider’, New Age (23 June 1910).