Читать книгу Walter Sickert: A Life - Matthew Sturgis - Страница 8

I think I could recommend you a boy.

(G. F. Maclear to Reginald Poole)

Within the family, Walter’s spirit and his domination of his younger brothers were beginning to cause some anxiety. It was decided that he needed a more challenging environment than could be provided by the little school in Pembridge Villas and that he needed to be separated from his brothers, or, rather, they needed to be separated from him. (Helena, whose health was causing some concern, had already been sent away to school at Miss Slee’s now somewhat reduced establishment in Dieppe.¹) After the matter had been inquired into with obvious thoroughness, the boys were divided up between three of London’s leading public schools. Robert went to UCS, and Bernhard to the City of London School (where it was hoped that the formidable Headmaster, Dr Abbot, would ‘cure him of laziness’). Walter was enrolled at King’s College School. He arrived – aged fifteen – for the autumn term of 1875.²

The school was then housed in the basement of the east enfilade of Somerset House, next to King’s College itself. It was essentially a day school, though a few of the 550 pupils ‘boarded’ at the houses of the married masters. The main entrance was on the Strand, where, opposite the gates of St Mary-le-Strand, a broad flight of steps ran down to an inaptly named concrete ‘playground’ in which no games were ever played. Although the school dining room looked out over the river, and at least some of the classrooms were large high-ceilinged spaces level with the street, the principal flavour was one of subterranean gloom and confinement. The place was sometimes referred to, with as much truth as humour, as ‘the dungeon on the Strand’³. The first – and defining – feature of the school was a long, narrow, and dimly lit vaulted corridor off which most of the classrooms led. Dark, even during summer, it was lit by a line of gas lamps that lent their own particular aroma to the inevitable institutional scents of floor polish, cabbage, and unwashed boy. From 11.15 to 11.30 a.m. and from 1 to 1.30 p.m., and at the end of the day’s work, the corridor was generally ‘a pandemonium of yelling, shouting and singing’. Some of the bigger and ‘lustier fellows’ of the Lower School would sometimes amuse themselves by linking arms and rushing down the passage, ‘to the extreme discomfort of those who failed to get out of their way in time’.⁴ For Walter, however, the site was fraught with positive familial associations. It was in the basements of Somerset House that Richard Sheepshanks had carried out his comparative measurements to establish the new official yard.

At King’s College School in the 1870s the syllabus was rigorously limited. In the ‘Classical Division’ to which Sickert belonged the concentration was on Latin and Greek. The study of these was supplemented by courses in mathematics, English literature, French, and divinity. German and drawing were offered as optional extras, and a ‘course of lectures on some branch of experimental science’ was provided as an afterthought.^* It was a system that Sickert came to appreciate. Many years later, when visiting St Felix School, Southwold in the late 1920s to give a lecture on art, he was amazed at the number of subjects being taught. There were at least nine different ones included in the weekly timetable. ‘Tiens!’ he exclaimed. ‘Three subjects are enough. Latin, English and Mathematics. Then the pupils may leave school knowing a little about something which would give them confidence which is so necessary for their future studies, instead of nothing about anything at all.’⁵

The school, presided over by the long-serving Revd G. F. Maclear, had established an excellent academic reputation. There were many good and several excellent teachers. Sickert’s form master was the genial Dr Robert Belcher. Walter soon began to flourish under his tutelage. He already had some grasp of both Latin and Greek, but this deepened under the regime of close reading, ‘prose writing’, and Greek verse composition. Walter developed a real familiarity with – and enduring love for – the language and literature of classical antiquity. Without laying claim to being a scholar, he continued to read – and to misquote – the classical authors with relish throughout his life. His particular favourite was the clear-sighted, unsentimental epigrammist Martial.⁶

Sickert, so he claimed, was also ‘naturally and from heredity interested in mathematics’. He would work out geometry propositions on his daily walk to school.⁷ But it was in the modern languages that he really excelled. His polyglot upbringing (and the fact that most of his contemporaries ‘took neither French or German classes very seriously’⁸) gave him ample opportunity to shine. He won the Upper School French Prize in Michaelmas 1876, and the Upper School German Prize the following term. And at the annual prize-giving, at Christmas 1877, he carried off the Vice-Master’s German Prize.⁹

Art was not one of the strengths of King’s College School. Although the great watercolourist John Sell Cotman had taught drawing at the school in the 1830s, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had briefly been a pupil, they had left no enduring legacy. Art was not part of the curriculum and could only be taken as an extra option at the extra cost of a guinea a term.¹⁰ There is no evidence to suggest that Walter ever studied it. Not that he needed the structure of formal classes to stimulate his interest. He drew incessantly, and achieved some recognition for his work amongst his schoolfellows. On one memorable occasion when he was caught drawing caricatures in class, the form master, instead of punishing him, framed the confiscated picture.¹¹

Class work, it seems, only ever absorbed so much of Walter’s attention. He was undaunted by the wider stage of his new school, and soon surrounded himself with new friends, among them the school’s leading scholar, Alfred Pollard, and Alfred Kalisch (who became the music critic for the Daily News).¹² Sickert’s energy and liveliness were captivating, and so were his emerging good looks. One former classmate recalled that even as a schoolboy he had the glamour that attaches to the ‘extremely handsome’.¹³ He delighted in doing the unexpected. One of the Japanese boys from Mr Hunt’s school had also moved to KCS and Walter greatly surprised and impressed his new schoolmates by addressing him in Japanese.¹⁴

Amongst his other pranks was a scheme to undercut the school tuck shop by setting up his own doughnut stall at break time. KCS pupils had long been complaining at the quality of the fare provided by Mr Reynolds – the local baker who ran the tuck shop – and at ‘the enormous profits’ that he made from his monopoly. Like many of Sickert’s later commercial ventures, the doughnut stall was not a financial success and was closed down by the authorities. He sometimes claimed that the scam led to his expulsion from the school, but this was an exaggeration.¹⁵ The headmaster was, on the whole, indulgent of Walter’s irregularities.¹⁶ He was mindful perhaps of his contributions to other areas of school life.

Dr Maclear took a particular interest in the end-of-year performances put on as part of the Christmas prize-giving. A mixed programme was presented with scenes not only from Shakespeare and the other English classics but also from Greek, Latin, French, and German dramas – all done in their original languages. Sickert excelled in these. He earned an early fame for his performance in the late-medieval farce L’Avocat Pathelin, in which his French was considered to be ‘perfect’.¹⁷

Although divinity was a compulsory subject, and each day began with a fifteen-minute service in chapel, the atmosphere of the school was not markedly religious. Walter got confirmed while he was there, but he treated the whole matter with ‘genial cynicism’ and, having been rewarded with the gift of a watch, promptly gave up going to church on Sundays with his mother and siblings.¹⁸ It was just one of the ways in which he started to emancipate himself from family life. While Robert and Bernhard retreated home from their respective schools, becoming more dreamy and inward looking, Walter took off in new directions. He made his own friends and ‘lived a life of his own’.¹⁹

He began to explore London. It teemed outside the school gates. Alfred Pollard recalled that to attend KCS was to have it ‘daily borne in on one … that one [was] a citizen of a great city’.²⁰ A constant tide of human – and animal – traffic passed before the school and through the triple portal of Temple Bar, Wren’s baroque gateway linking the City and the West End – the allied worlds of Business and Pleasure. King’s College School stood, albeit with a certain aloofness, in the world of Pleasure. Despite the nearby presence of the Law Courts, the surrounding area had a hazardous reputation. It was thick with public houses and theatres. The Strand was the most notorious thoroughfare in Central London: no respectable woman would walk down it unaccompanied for fear of being mistaken for a prostitute. North of the school lay Covent Garden, and the disreputable courts and alleys around Holywell Street – centre of the second-hand-book and pornography trades.

For the King’s College School students the pleasures afforded by the area tended to be rather more innocent. As one former pupil remembered, after school (3 p.m. on most days, but 1 p.m. on Wednesdays, and noon on Saturdays) many boys headed off to eat ices at Gatti’s in the Adelaide Gallery, or went to Sainsbury’s, ‘a chemist close to the school who sold splendid iced soda drinks from a fountain’.²¹ Sickert, however, was more adventurous and inquisitive. He was, in the words of one schoolfellow, ‘the cat that walked by itself’. ‘He didn’t care to do our things, he was aloof … but he could be wonderfully good company when he was in the mood. Everyone liked to be asked to walk home with him from school. He never invited more than two of us at a time. He knew North London like the back of his hand, he could tell us endless stories about the little streets and byways as we went along and pointed out pictures that we hadn’t seen.’²²

His journey home would often be broken by a prolonged loiter in Wellington Street, before the office windows of Entr’acte magazine – a review of the contemporary theatrical and music-hall scene. There he could avidly scrutinize the most recent works of the paper’s star artist, Alfred Bryan, that were pinned up for display.²³

Although he admired Bryan’s dashing if rather facile work, and that of several other black-and-white men, his great enthusiasm was for the drawing of Charles Keene. Since 1850, Keene had been one of the leading draughtsmen on Punch. His assured but loosely executed cartoons captured the vital flavours of Victorian popular life with unrivalled brio. Better than any of his contemporaries, it was said, he could ‘emphasise the absurdity of a City man’s hat’, suggest the ‘twist of a drunkard’s coat’ or ‘an old lady’s bombazeen about to pop’. And he did it with a delicacy that often left the viewer in some doubt as to whether it was caricature at all. Keene became Sickert’s first artistic hero.

It was an admiration that he shared with a select band of discerning spirits. Amongst his schoolfriends was a young boarder, a Scot called Joseph Crawhall, whose facility at drawing exceeded even Sickert’s own. Unlike Sickert, he took Mr Delamotte’s optional art classes, and he carried off the Middle School drawing prize in both the Lent 1878 and Summer 1879 terms; he had also exhibited a picture at the Newcastle Arts Association. These were distinctions, however, that counted for little in Sickert’s eyes besides the more important fact that his father – Joseph Crawhall Senior – was a friend of Charles Keene’s. Mr Crawhall would even send Keene jokes from time to time, which the artist might transform into cartoons, sending back a drawing by way of thanks. The presence of these Keene originals on the walls of the Crawhall home was, Sickert believed, the reason for young Joseph’s advanced abilities. He had enjoyed, as Sickert later put it, ‘the advantage of growing up in the most distinguished artistic atmosphere’ available in Great Britain in the late 1870s.²⁴

Sickert, though he had to rely on the printed reproductions in Punch, rather than on originals, steeped himself in the same ‘distinguished’ atmosphere. Outside the circle of aficionados, of course, Keene’s work – though recognized as entertaining – was regarded as anything but distinguished. Keene, to the majority, was no more than a hack cartoonist turning out scenes of vulgar life for a comic weekly, in a style that many considered rather ‘rough’.²⁵ But Sickert – with the example of his own father’s career on the Fliegende Blätter before him – was not inclined to make conventional distinctions between high and low culture; from the start he considered Keene as an artist.

The attractions of Keene’s art to the young Sickert were many. It provided a vivid commentary on the familiar aspects of contemporary life – aspects ignored in most other artworks. From looking at Keene’s drawings Sickert also began to understand the secret of composition. He observed the way in which ‘a situation’ was expressed pictorially by ‘the relationship of one figure to another’, and how figures needed to be conceived ‘as a whole’, rather than being mere appendages of their facial expressions.²⁶ He admired Keene’s eye for the small but telling physical detail. In a picture of a lady remonstrating with her gardener, he would point out delightedly how the artist had drawn the gardener’s trousers, catching ‘the bagginess of the knees’, the result of a lifetime’s weeding: ‘You can see he is a gardener.’²⁷ A love of Keene led Sickert back to discover his forebears: Leech, Cruikshank, Rowlandson, and Hogarth. Bit by bit he pieced together the extraordinarily vigorous tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English graphic art, with its abiding delight in ‘low life’ subjects and suggestive narratives.

In tandem with his enthusiastic study of Keene, Sickert also began to explore the National Gallery. Conveniently placed at the other end of the Strand, in Trafalgar Square, he passed it on his way home from school each day. He ‘saturated’ himself in the collection, and, through the parade of masterpieces, was able to acquaint himself with the outline of Western art history from the Renaissance onwards. (He always retained a belief that ‘chronological’ hanging was the best – indeed the only – way to arrange a major public gallery.²⁸)

The pictorial diet of Keene and the National Gallery gave Sickert an early understanding of the possibilities of art, one that would have been hard to gain at Bedford, or almost anywhere else. As his father remarked with a touch of envy, ‘At your age I had never seen a good painting.’²⁹ But the actual effect of all this stimulation upon Sickert’s own artistic experiments is hard to gauge. Nothing survives. The caricatures that he drew during his school lessons almost certainly reflected his study of Keene, Bryan, and the other popular cartoonists. There is no trace of either Punch or the old masters, however, in the small, well-constructed drawing of a girl sitting by a river, done in the summer of 1876 on the family holiday to the island of Fohr, off the Schleswig coast.^* And it was the desire to imitate his father’s Bavarian sous-bois scenes that led him, the following summer, to take his gouaches to Kensington Gardens in order to try and capture the effects of sunlight falling through trees.³⁰

The National Gallery was not the only cultural institution that Sickert began to frequent, nor was Charles Keene the only object of his schoolboy idolatry. Almost immediately opposite the gates of King’s College School stood the entrance to the Lyceum Theatre. Since 1871 it had been under the management of Mr and Mrs Bateman. They had taken the theatre as a showcase for the talents of their third daughter, Isobel, and had engaged the 33-year-old and barely known Henry Irving as their leading man. The theatre had a commercial reputation for being ‘unlucky’, which the early Bateman productions did little to overturn. But – at the end of that first year – Irving persuaded his employers to allow him to mount a production of Leopold Lewis’s horror-piece The Bells. The play proved an immediate and spectacular success. Irving was raised suddenly to a glorious prominence – and the Lyceum was raised with him. His talent, charisma, and commercial acumen transformed the faltering playhouse into one of the leading venues in London. He came effectively to run the place. It was he who chose the productions, took the title roles, and drew the crowds. His style of acting was something strangely new and different, almost overwhelming in its intensity. His readings of the classic parts were often very different from those of theatrical convention, charged with a new sense of psychological truth. But in every role he was recognizably Irving. Whatever the costume, he was a curious and unforgettable figure with his gaunt features, distinctive mannerisms, peculiar pronunciation, and halting gait. But if he commanded attention, he also divided opinion. There were those who carped at his idiosyncrasies, denied his power, and questioned his interpretations. Such dissent, however, merely fired his supporters with greater zeal.³¹

The teenage Sickert became one of the most zealous of his defenders.^* He attended the Lyceum with a passionate commitment and found himself drawn into the orbit of fellow enthusiasts. Despite his comparative youth he was taken up by a group of students from the Slade, the art school attached to University College in Gower Street. They would attend Lyceum first nights en bloc and then crowd outside the stage door to cheer Irving to his carriage at the end of the evening. To be part of this excited band was an intoxicating taste of freedom and community.³²

The gatherings were known as ‘rabbles’, and they were mythologized even as they were enjoyed. Arthur Kennedy, one of the leaders of the group, recorded their exploits in mock heroic verse. Their attendance of a performance of Richard III was celebrated by a parody of William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, beginning,

The master of masters is Irving, and his lofty roof-trees stand

In glory of gold and marble, by the river’s golden Strand.

They are high, well-built and glorious, and many doors have they,

But one door is low-browed and mystic and dim and cloudy and grey,

And over its darkling throat, on the very lintel is writ

In letters of fire of magic, the name of the Mouth of the Pit.…

A goodly company are they of damsels and lofty men

And ten are high-born maidens, and fearless knights are ten.

And there on the steps of the threshold they range in a two fold ring,

Round a radiant lady, their leader, whose name is a month in spring.

The ‘radiant lady’ reference was to Margery May, a Slade scholar (and the future Lady Horne), who was the most impassioned devotee. Amongst the listed assembly of ‘fearless knights’ Sickert was designated as ‘a scholar, well-taught in many a thing,/Who journeyed north to join them, from the College of the King’.³³ By this band, Irving was accounted a deity. When the Sickerts’ down-to-earth cook poured cold water on their ‘Irving delirium’ by remarking, ‘After all, Irving’s only a man when all’s said and done’, it came – Walter recalled – ‘as a shock to Margery May, and certainly to me’.³⁴

In imitation of Irving, Sickert began mounting his own Shakespearean productions in the holidays. He named his troupe the Hypocrites, or ‘Hyps’. During the summer of 1877, while staying at Newquay, he dragooned his siblings and friends into performing a cut-down version of Macbeth. It was a radical open-air production staged in an old quarry. The dramatic effect of the setting, however, was slightly undermined when Walter (in the title role) turned his ankle while making his first entrance down the steep scree – and completed the descent upon his bottom, to the ill-suppressed amusement of the three witches.³⁵ It was not the sort of thing that happened to Irving – and Irving was Walter’s model. He developed an arresting impersonation of the great man’s style. At the school prize day that Christmas he caused what the headmaster described as a ‘sensation’ with his rendition of a speech from Richard III in the manner of Irving.³⁶ It was a performance that raised Sickert to a new prominence within the school, eclipsing even his coincidental triumph in the Vice-Master’s German Prize.^*

Sickert’s friendship with the Slade rabble-rousers forged an important connection in his mind between art and the theatre. Years later he recalled the benefits of this nexus, and urged the ‘stage’ to draw, once more, closer to the ‘brush’. (He suggested that the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells should offer free seats in the gallery to all art students.) ‘Actors’, as he noted, ‘know there is no propaganda like the enthusiasm of young students’; while the stage offered young painters not only an education in English literature but also a potential subject. Even as a teenager, it seems, Sickert recognized the possibility of making pictures ‘drawn from the theatre’.³⁷

In the short term, his friendship with the band of stage-struck art students served to open up the London art world for him, bringing him into contact with the more vital currents of contemporary painting. Inspired, as he later admitted, in part by ‘intellectual snobbishness’ and ‘the “urge” to compete in agreeing with ladies a little older’ than himself, he began to look beyond the simple pleasures of ‘the narrative picture’ and to fidget after ‘novelty’.³⁸

Artistic novelty was in rather short supply in the London of the late 1870s. The great masters of the previous age, Constable and Turner, were dead, and their heirs were not apparent. The Royal Academy had become stultified by its own commercial success, and had dragged most of the other chartered art institutions along with it. The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – who had promised to reinvigorate art in the 1850s – had gone their separate ways. Rossetti had retreated into seclusion, and no longer exhibited. Holman Hunt stood aloof. Millais had embraced the world, acceding to the Royal Academy, social success, and a highly profitable career as a portrait painter. He was the self-assumed ‘head of the profession’, and he held that the baronetcy he had received was no more than a proper ‘encouragement to the pursuit of art in its highest and noblest form’. He lived in a mansion in Palace Gate, and Sickert would sometimes see him sitting with a friend on a bench in Kensington Gardens, ‘a touching and majestical presence’, resembling more ‘an angelic and blustering personification of John Bull’ than a painter.³⁹ The vast majority of British artists subscribed only too gladly – as one critic has said – to John Wilkie’s ‘cynical formula that “to know the taste of the public, to learn what will best please the employer, is to the artist the most valuable of knowledge”’. And what the paying public wanted was anecdote, sentiment, moral tone, and workmanship. To a society that saw virtue in labour, ‘high finish’ was regarded as the one necessary technical requirement. The other – even more important – criterion was subject matter: it had to be either sentimental or edifying, and – if possible – both. The Baby was the dominant motif of most British exhibitions at this period.⁴⁰

And yet within the tradition there were some signs of flickering life. George Frederick Watts, though he claimed that his pictures ‘were not paintings but sermons’, was producing works of undeniable force and achievement. There was vitality, too, in both the idealized classicism of Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter, and Albert Moore, and the romanticized realism of a second generation of Pre-Raphaelites – the heirs of Rossetti – led by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

Arthur Kennedy took Sickert and other Slade friends to Burne-Jones’s house in the North End Road, West Kensington. There they were allowed to look over the artist’s studio and inspect his pictures of gracefully androgynous beings with retroussé noses looking pale and interesting amongst garlands of improbably detailed flora. Sickert was impressed, but grudgingly so. He recognized Burne-Jones as a ‘brilliant draughtsman’ but remained only half-attracted – and half repelled – by his paintings. The realm of ‘strange and exquisite fancy’ that the artist had created, though undeniably powerful, was impossibly alien to Sickert, who possessed almost no sense of ‘fancy’, exquisite or otherwise.⁴¹ Nevertheless, despite his artistic reservations he found himself connected – albeit loosely – to this ardent Pre-Raphaelite world. His sister, Helena, now fourteen, was attending Notting Hill High School and had become friendly both with Burne-Jones’s daughter, Margaret, and William Morris’s two girls, Jenny and Mary (known as ‘Jennyanmay’). They often spent their weekends at each other’s houses; Helena would borrow copies of Morris’s beautifully produced Kelmscott books and bring them home. Both Morris and Burne-Jones called on the Sickerts, while Morris’s disciple, William de Morgan, was already known to the family through his connection with the Sheepshanks.⁴²

Sickert encountered Burne-Jones’s work again later in that summer of 1877 at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street. It was the art event of the year. The Grosvenor was a new phenomenon. There had been commercial galleries before, but none conceived on such a scale, nor carried off with such taste. Established by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, it was to be a veritable ‘Temple of Art’, offering the discerning public the chance to see the most up-to-date work in surroundings that suggested an idealized drawing room, or ‘some old Venetian palace’, rather than an overcrowded auction house.⁴³ Burne-Jones was the star of the show, represented by, amongst other major works, The Seven Days of Creation, The Mirror of Venus, and The Beguiling of Merlin. There were pictures by his followers and rivals, minutely detailed, richly coloured representations of myth and legend. One wall glowed with the brooding metaphorical figure-paintings of G. F. Watts, another with the serene, soft-tinted classical beauties of Albert Moore. But it was not these that excited the 17-year-old Sickert. His attention was arrested by three tall canvases hung to the left of the door in the ‘large gallery’. All were interesting, and one was particularly well calculated to appeal: a portrait of Henry Irving as Phillip II of Spain. They were the work of the American-born, Paris-trained artist, James McNeill Whistler.

Sickert, by his own rather heightened account, experienced an artistic epiphany:

To a few, a very few, these and the other [five] canvases by Whistler [on view] came as a revelation, a thing of absolute conviction, admitting of no doubt or hesitation. Here was the finger of God. The rest became mere paint. Excellent, meritorious, worthy, some of it was, but it was mere paint and canvas. Here a thin girl, now in white muslin with black bows, now in a fur jacket and hat, breathed into being without any means being apparent. She stood, startled, in those narrow frames, and stared at you, with white face and red lips, out of nowhere whence she had emerged. There was a blue sea and a sandy shore, with a man in a light grey coat – Courbet, as I afterwards learnt. There was a snow scene in London in a fog, with a draggled little figure shuffling towards a lighted window. No one who was not there can imagine the revelation which these canvases were at that time.⁴⁴

To most observers the revelation was an unwelcome one. To Millais and W. P. Frith, Whistler was a ‘a sort of Gorgon’s head’, while a critical establishment that set store by subject matter, sentiment, fine detail, and high finish, found his muted, ‘impressionistic’, often subjectless pictures all but incomprehensible.⁴⁵ Their titles – which borrowed from the vocabulary of music: ‘Nocturne’, ‘Symphony’, ‘Arrangement’ – were an affront to sense. The pictures might be ‘clever’; indeed – according to Millais – they were ‘a damned sight too clever!’ They were certainly alien, and probably dangerous. And like most ingenious alien dangers, they seemed to have their origins in modern France. Whistler, it was acknowledged, was a practitioner of something called ‘Impressionism’, although just what ‘Impressionism’ might be, most critics thought it safest not to enquire too closely: it was enough to know that it came from France and that Whistler was its sole advocate in England. He was also an advocate who demanded a hearing.

Whistler, at forty-three, was already a conspicuous figure. His distinct and dandified appearance – unruly black locks set off by a shock of white hair, Mephistophelean moustache, monocle, wasp-waisted coat, short cane, top hat and Yankee swagger – was fixed by the caricaturists. His astringent comments and sharp witticisms were reported, not infrequently by himself, in the press. His Sunday ‘breakfast’ parties, which lasted most of the afternoon, were notorious. His views on art, interior decoration, oriental porcelain, and gallery design were proclaimed with a self-assurance that often crossed the borders of arrogance. These were things not likely to put off an admiring teenager. Whistler was set up beside Keene and Irving in Sickert’s select personal pantheon.

He was a deity in need of adherents. If the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition had a profound effect on Sickert’s life, it had an even deeper one on Whistler’s. Amongst the pictures he exhibited was one – not much remarked by Sickert – called Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a small canvas of dark blue-blacks scattered – if not spattered – with points of brightness: the image of a firework display. This was the painting that so enraged Ruskin, the ageing arbiter of Victorian artistic taste: the pot of paint flung in the public’s face, for which Whistler had the ‘cockney impudence’ to be asking two hundred guineas. Whistler responded to Ruskin’s intemperate critique with a writ of libel.⁴⁶

The action drew a battle line through the British art world. Neutrality was all but impossible. Those who were not with Whistler were against him. And most people were against him. The feelings of bafflement, irritation, and scorn that Whistler’s art already engendered in the mind of the gallery-going public became intensified and took on a personal edge as the legal process advanced during 1878. When the case was heard in November, Burne-Jones and W. P. Frith both appeared against Whistler in the witness box; others spoke against him in the press, the studio, and the drawing room. Only a bold few rallied to his standard. Sickert, of course, was of their number. If he did not attend the trial, he followed its progress and lamented its conclusion: Whistler, with much shrillness and no little wit, won the verdict, but gained only a farthing’s damages, a huge legal bill, and the general disapprobation of the public. To Sickert, however, he remained a hero. And when, crowing over his nominal victory, Whistler published an annotated transcript of the proceedings, Sickert bought a copy.⁴⁷

Walter’s independent life amongst the unchaperoned worlds of the art school and the stage was the cause of some concern at home. Edith, the daughter of Hugh Carter, recalled that as a child she heard Mrs Sickert lamenting, ‘I don’t know what to do about Walter, he is so wayward’, after which pronouncement she (though only aged about five) would not let Walter hold her hand as he accompanied her and her brother to their kindergarten on his own way to school. ‘No,’ she informed him with the moral assurance of the young. ‘You worry your mother.’⁴⁸ The main worry was Walter’s interest in girls. He had developed a crush on Edith Carter’s mother, Maria, who was barely thirty and very beautiful. Indeed he described her as his ‘first love’. And other less exalted loves seem to have followed soon after. Edith remembered one morning, while playing in the Sickerts’ garden, seeing Walter – still in his evening clothes – sneak into the house ‘by the back alley, in the most extraordinary way’. (She was told not to make any remarks about it.)⁴⁹

It was clear that Walter had begun to strain the bounds of both home and school life. At King’s College School he had certainly gained that intellectual ‘confidence’ from ‘knowing a little about something’ which he came to regard as the goal of good schooling. At the beginning of 1878, Dr Maclear wrote to Professor Reginald Poole at the British Museum, recommending Walter for a possible post in the Coins and Medals department.⁵⁰ Mrs Sickert was very grateful for this initiative. There was a tone of real relief in her letter of thanks to Maclear for his good offices: ‘I assure you that we are very grateful to you for your kindness in helping [Walter] to what we believe to be most congenial work. We sincerely believe that [he] will show himself to be worthy of your good opinion and hope that you will continue to feel a kindly interest in him.’⁵¹ A job would have the double benefit of occupying Walter’s energies and relieving the Sickerts’ domestic finances.

Anne Sheepshanks, the family’s guardian angel, had died two years previously – in February 1876 – and while Mrs Sickert’s allowance was continued it was not increased. (After various bequests to Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Royal Astronomical Society, the bulk of Anne Sheepshanks’ estate had been left in trust for the support of her last surviving sibling, the recently widowed Susanna Levett.⁵²) Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1878 the Sickerts moved from their home in Notting Hill across to the other side of Hyde Park, to 12 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington. The new house – a three-storey semi-detached villa with an ‘extra wing’ – was bigger, if only slightly, than Hanover Terrace. Built just fifteen years before, with an eye to suggesting, rather than providing, a modest grandeur, the rooms were all too high for their width, and the staircases too narrow to allow two people to pass. The rent – at £90 a year – marked an increase in the family expenses, and must have made the prospect of Walter entering paid employment additionally attractive.⁵³

But it was not to be. Professor Poole was after a pure classicist rather than an all-round linguist. He was impressed by Sickert, however, and offered to assist him if he wished to reapply for another post at a later date.⁵⁴ Walter returned to school at the start of 1878 and ‘settled down to work in the matriculation class’.⁵⁵ He enjoyed the challenge of exams and, concentrating his energies, passed with First Class honours.⁵⁶

His academic achievements were such that they might perhaps have been expected to lead on to university – his friend Alfred Pollard had already gone up to Oxford with a scholarship.⁵⁷ But the expense of a university education was beyond the Sickert budget.⁵⁸ Walter, it was recognized, must get a job. Initially, when consulted by his father – during one of their walks together on Wormwood Scrubs – as to his hopes for the future, he had suggested rather unhelpfully that he intended to be ‘An Universalgenie’ (he had been reading a life of Goethe).⁵⁹ Universal geniuses, however, were not a commodity in the employment market. Besides, Walter’s own views came into sharper focus during his last year of schooling. He was, his sister recalled, ‘in no doubt that his vocation lay in painting’.⁶⁰

This was the last thing that his parents wanted to hear. Oswald Sickert had dedicated his life to art and was keenly aware that he had not made his living from it. Although the evidence of great artistic fortunes was everywhere to hand – visible in the huge studio-palaces of Melbury Road, Holland Park – such riches were beyond his reach. And they were receding further. The high watermark of Victorian prosperity was already passing. Painting was an overcrowded profession, and Oswald Sickert was being crowded out. He had come to regard himself as a failure.⁶¹ It was the Sheepshanks’ allowance rather than the meagre returns from any sales he might make that paid the household bills. And the Sheepshanks’ resources were finite: they could not stretch to provide Walter with the sort of prolonged and dedicated training that Oswald had enjoyed at Munich and Paris. Besides, although he had ‘a great opinion of Walter’s abilities in general’, neither he nor Mrs Sickert believed that they were ‘specialised in painting’.⁶² He did everything possible to discourage his son from following him in what he described as his ‘chien de métier’.⁶³

In the face of such opposition, Walter made some efforts in alternative directions. He considered applying for the higher division of the Home Civil Service. But this, he discovered, would require three years’ coaching, which would be just as expensive as university.⁶⁴ He wrote to Professor Poole, asking if places at the British Museum Library might ‘be got separately from [such] general Examinations … and if you think there would be any chance for me’.⁶⁵ The answer did not encourage him to pursue this course. His father urged him towards any career where he would be sure of earning a living.⁶⁶ The law was suggested, and given serious consideration⁶⁷ – although this, too, unless begun in a lowly clerical capacity, would have required some expensive training.

Beyond these conventional options a more tempting vista beckoned. The stage. Extraordinarily, the idea was not thrown out of court. But then, compared to Oswald Sickert’s ‘dog of a profession’, acting had various attractions. It was not a calling that the Sickerts knew to be unremunerative – even if this was only because they knew very little about it at all. It was no longer socially beyond the pale, at least not in the artistic circles frequented by the Sickerts; and, unlike almost all other professions, it required no formal and expensive training, and no fees of entry.

They were encouraged, too, by the example of their friends the Forbes-Robertsons. John Forbes-Robertson, a prolific art journalist and lecturer, lived with his wife and five children in a large house in Charlotte Street, just off Bedford Square.⁶⁸ His eldest son, Johnston, although having begun an art training at the RA schools, had been obliged ‘by force of circumstances’ to give it up and seek a more immediately rewarding career.⁶⁹ He had found it on the stage. A family friend had got him a small part in a play at the Princess Theatre. And from that beginning he had managed to make his own way as an actor. He had performed in Samuel Phelps’s company, acted with Ellen Terry on her triumphant return to the London stage, and was steadily in work.⁷⁰ His younger brother, Ian, was just about to embark upon the same path.⁷¹ Here were models for emulation. And if the stage offered little security, it was at least susceptible to energy and talent, and Walter – it seemed – had both.

He rounded off his school career, at the end-of-year Prize Day, by giving a stirring performance as Cardinal Wolsey in a selection of scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.⁷² To his proud parents, appreciative teachers, and admiring peers, it must have seemed only too likely that he would succeed on his chosen path.

^* The ‘Modern Division’ offered a less rigorously academic approach, with vocational courses in book-keeping and map drawing.

^* This of course may be because the picture (now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), though found in Sickert’s studio at his death, was not by his hand.

^* In 1877, Samuel Phelps, his previous thespian hero, had died at the age of seventy-four. Sickert walked to Highgate for his funeral (RE, 24).

^* Sickert’s dramatic experiments did occasionally look beyond the example of Irving. Once, he dressed up as a maid and called on the Carters, pretending to be in search of a situation. He took in the whole family until Mrs Carter’s parting shot – ‘You know I don’t allow any followers’ – induced him to break into ‘an irresistible smile which gave the show away’ (Edith Ortmans, née Carter, TS, Sutton/GUL).