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.’