Such gatherings had a comfortably familiar air. In more ‘English’ society – though the Sickerts found many ready friends – there always remained the faint hint of ambiguity about their exact position. The Sheepshanks connection, so beneficial in all other respects, carried with it the taint of Mrs Sickert’s illegitimate origins – even if the details of those origins were not known to all and were often confused by those who were aware of them. (At least one friend supposed that Mrs Sickert was the natural daughter of John, rather than Richard, Sheepshanks.37) Amongst most members of the ‘artistic’ world Mrs Sickert’s position would have counted for little, but on the broader social plane the possibility of affront and insult – if remote – could never be entirely forgotten. There clung, too, to the family and to the family home, a slight but distinct sense of difference – of foreignness. The Sickerts played German music, sang German songs, and had German books on their shelves.38 They preserved the Munich habit of eating their ‘dinner’ at noon, and having only a light ‘tea’ or ‘supper’ in the evening – a fact that occasionally caused the children embarrassment when English visitors called.39 The family, according with Continental custom, celebrated Christmas on the night of Christmas Eve, and did so in what outsiders considered a ‘high Germanic’ fashion.40 These marks of otherness were small, but they were sufficient to give the Sickerts both a sense of closeness amongst themselves and of detachment from the world they found themselves in.
Of these two impulses, ‘detachment’ was the one that touched Walter most strongly. It became his mark as both a person and a painter. And though essentially an innate trait of his character, the tensions of his London childhood sharpened it and gave it direction. Walter did not retreat into his own world. From the start he engaged enthusiastically with English life and English ways. ‘Nobody,’ it was later said of him, ‘was more English.’ But his understanding of Englishness was gained from the outside. It was – as one English friend noted – ‘his northern foreign blood’ that ‘afforded him just the requisite impetus to understand especially well this country and its ways’.41
The upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War encouraged the Sickerts to spend their holidays in England. In the summer of 1870, Mr Sickert took Walter and the other children to the seaside at Lowestoft. While he sketched and painted, the boys flew kites and built sandcastles. Walter was much impressed too by the sight of a drowned man, and much excited by the sight of the lovely Mrs Swears, the beauty of the season, who would drive up and down the front in her carriage, her long hair streaming in the wind.42 In the following years they visited Ilfracombe and Harwich.43
Mrs Sickert did not accompany the family to Lowestoft, perhaps because she was pregnant. At the beginning of 1871, Walter got a new brother. Born on 14 February, he was duly christened Oswald Valentine. To simplify the logistics of family life, Walter was taken out of UCS and sent, along with Robert and Bernhard, to a new school close to Hanover Terrace. The Bayswater Collegiate School was situated at ‘Chepstow Lodge’, 1 Pembridge Villas, on the corner with Chepstow Place, four doors down (as Sickert liked to point out) from the celebrated Victorian genre painter, W. P. Frith. It was run by William T. Hunt, a young man in his early thirties with progressive ideas.44
Helena’s chief recollection of her brothers’ schooling was of them being chivvied off by their mother in the morning and then coming home in the afternoon without the books necessary for their prep. In the case of Robert and Bernhard such oversights tended to be the result of inattention; both brothers were what was called ‘dreamy’. If Walter forgot his books, however, it was probably because he was thinking of so many other things. Although he hated organized games, he was always ‘prodigiously energetic’, busy with something outside the school curriculum – acting, drawing, even learning Japanese. There were five Japanese boys at the school, sent to England by their feudal clan – Hachizuka – to study English. (All subsequently rose to positions of prominence in Japan.) Walter adopted them, and brought them back to Hanover Terrace. ‘We liked them better than the English boys,’ Helena recalled. She was particularly fond of Hamaguchi Shintaro – ‘a delightful little fellow’ with ‘exquisite manners’ who could play six games of chess at once.45 But it is uncertain how long the close connection lasted. Walter’s enthusiasms for people were not always sustained. Though ‘very sociable and charming’, he had – as his sister put it – ‘a way of shedding acquaintances and even friends’. Sometimes an actual quarrel precipitated the break, but more often there was merely a removal of favour, as his interest shifted on to somebody – or something – new. To the rejected, this exclusion from the charmed radiance of Walter’s friendship tended to come as a horrid and unexpected blow, and it was often left to Mrs Sickert to ‘comfort’ the unfortunates and excuse her son’s fickleness.46
Many years later, the novelist Hugh Walpole, describing Sickert’s character, remarked, ‘[he] isolates himself utterly from everybody’. It was not that he was ‘hermit like or scornful of life’. Far from it: he was ‘eager to hear anything about life at all … but his personality is so entirely of its own and so distinctive that he makes a world of his own’. And it is clear that even in childhood these traits were evident. While a person stood in some relation to Sickert’s current interest they enjoyed the favour of access to his world. But his interests changed often. As Walpole noted, there was no limit to them: ‘morals, families, personal habits, colours, games’.47 In 1904 Sickert explained to a female friend that he found absolutely everything ‘absorbingly interesting’, that there was ‘no end to the wonderful delights of life’. She felt that he was telling the truth, but considered that ‘such delightful fluency and ease [could] only come either from a dead heart or from a love, like God’s, that had done with personality and material things’.48
Walter, as a young child, did give some hints of a capacity for universal love. His mother reported that, while at Munich, he had asked her one night, before saying his prayers, ‘Mama, may I say God Bless all the world? I should like to say it because it would be kind.’49 But it seems more probable that his extraordinary relish for the incidents of life was another aspect of his detachment. A ‘dead heart’ is perhaps an unduly pejorative phrase. Although Sickert’s behaviour and his pronouncements, as both a child and a man, could sometimes seem unfeeling, even callous in their unflinching objectivity, there was something grand and invigorating about his enthusiasms, his openness to all sides of life, his refusal to accept hierarchies or to make judgements. He infected others, too, with verve. And though he might abandon his friends, many of them remained loyal to him and his memory even after he had moved on.
Walter’s schoolboy pursuits were legion. Inspired by the Prussians’ defeat of the Emperor Napoleon III, he created a variant of chess, called Sedan, in which the king could be taken.50 He also conceived a fascinated interest in the case of the Tichborne Claimant and followed its long unwinding closely. Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, the heir presumptive to the Tichborne Estates at Alresford, Hampshire, had sailed from