Walter Sickert: A Life. Matthew Sturgis

death of his father, Sir James, his younger brother, Alfred, assumed the title and estates, but died in 1866, leaving only an infant son. The old dowager Lady Tichborne, however, had never reconciled herself to the loss of her eldest son, and began to advertise abroad for news of his fate, hopeful that he had perhaps escaped the wreck. She was thrilled to receive word from a man in Australia who claimed to be her longlost boy. The man set sail for England at the end of 1866 and asserted his claim to be the Tichborne heir. In 1867 he was received by Lady Tichborne, who was living in Paris, and was apparently recognized by her as her son, even though there was no obvious physical resemblance, the claimant being a very stout man weighing some twenty stone and Roger Tichborne always having been conspicuously thin. His claim, unsurprisingly, was disputed by other members of the Tichborne family, and the matter went to court.

      The trial was long-drawn-out and sensational, with its cast of minor aristocrats, duplicitous servants, old sea dogs, and colonial adventurers. The fat, bewhiskered, rather dignified claimant was the star of the show. Minutely cross-examined about the facts of his supposed early life by a defence intent on proving that he was not Roger Tichborne at all, but Arthur Orton, the opportunistic emigrant son of a Wapping butcher who, anxious to escape from his debts in Wagga Wagga, had embarked upon a career of profitable deception, he remained unperturbed and unperturbable. Public opinion was sharply divided on the question of his bona fides, and remained divided throughout the trial. As Sickert later wrote: ‘We are born believers in or doubters of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne’s identity.’ He was a born believer.⁵¹

      His belief took a knock when the case collapsed in March 1871 and the claimant was arrested and charged with ‘wilful and corrupt perjury’. But the blow was not conclusive. The born believers held firm. While on bail awaiting trial (the new case was delayed for over a year) the claimant made a triumphal progress across England. In May 1872 he was given a hero’s welcome and a town parade at Southampton, not far from Alresford. When the second trial finally took place – it ran from February 1873 to February 1874 – the claimant was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. Even so, Sickert refused to relinquish his beliefs completely. ‘Are we even now quite sure,’ he wrote almost sixty years after the event, ‘of the rights in the matter of Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne?’⁵² The case never lost its appeal for him. The story of a relative disappearing into Australia, perhaps one day to return, exciting enough in itself, had an additional resonance for the grandson of Eleanor Henry.

      Walter also sought out drama in more conventional settings. He became stage-struck, or Bard-struck. At school they would read Shakespeare with Mr Hunt in the gardens of Pembridge Square. Walter soon purchased his own Globe edition of the works. He was taken by his parents to see Samuel Phelps, the great Shakespearean actor of the day, playing Shylock, Falstaff, Wolsey, Macbeth (and Sir Peter Teazle), and – enraptured by his performances – soon learnt to imitate his manner.⁵³

      But always alongside these other enthusiasms ran his constant interest in art. Throughout his schooldays, his sister recalled, ‘his most abiding pleasure was drawing & painting’. The ‘very little pocket money’ he received from his father was put towards buying art materials.⁵⁴ He also looked at pictures. He pored over the popular illustrated weeklies, drinking in the dramatic reportage of the Illustrated London News, the humorous diversions of Punch, and the educational diet of the Penny Magazine.55 He began to be taken to public galleries, and he was excited by what he saw. ‘It is natural to all ages,’ he later remarked, ‘to like the narrative picture, and I fancy, if we spoke the truth, and our memories are clear enough, that we liked at first the narrative picture in the proportion that it can be said to be lurid.’ The young Walter’s ‘uninfluenced interest’ was first captured at the South Kensington Museum by John ‘Mad’ Martin’s swirling, almost cinematic vision of Belshazzar’s Feast and by George Cruikshank’s melodramatic series of prints, The Bottle, depicting the awful and inevitable effects of drink upon a Victorian family.⁵⁶ From the early 1870s onwards, Walter also went with his father to the regular winter loanexhibitions held in the Royal Academy’s gallery at Burlington House.⁵⁷ There he was introduced to the works of the old masters. He ‘loved’ them from the first, perhaps not least because they, too, were often ‘narrative pictures’ and sometimes ‘lurid’.⁵⁸

      Almost unconsciously Walter absorbed many of the practical and professional concerns of picture making. At home and elsewhere they were constant elements in the life around him. He spent time too in the studios of his father’s friends. He even posed for a history painting, appearing as a young – and rather gawky – Nelson, in George William Joy’s picture, Thirty Years Before Trafalgar.⁵⁹

      In 1873 Mrs Sickert gave birth to her sixth and last child, another boy. He was christened Leonard but was known in the family as Leo.⁶⁰ Walter, however, was far removed from the world of the nursery. He was growing up. In the summer of 1874 the family went to the North Devon village of Mortehoe, renting a cottage from the local publican, Mr Conibear. It was a halcyon summer for Walter. The place was a ‘real favourite’. Several family friends joined them there. Walter helped on the farm, learning to cut and bind wheat, and how to drive a wagon through a gate. He made friends with the Conibear children. One day he discovered an octopus washed up on the seashore and, putting it on to a slate, took it up the hill to show to Professor T. H. Huxley, who was also staying in the village for the summer. The eminent scientist took at once to the inquisitive 14-year-old, and they became friends.⁶¹

An interest in cephalopods was not Walter’s only claim to precocity. He would rise early to help the milkmaids with their work – or, rather, to distract them. Years later, when writing to Nina Hamnett, he told her, ‘If you go to Barnstaple have look at Mortehoe, which I think adorable, probably because I used to make love to the milkmaids there when I was 14.’⁶² Although his love-making may have been no more than flirtation, it is possible that it went further.^* The suggestion is easy enough to credit. Walter’s excitement at the holiday is palpable. As early as the following March he was writing to Mr Conibear informing him that his parents would definitely be taking the house again the following summer, and enclosing two sketches – one of Mortehoe parish church, the other of a rocking horse recently given to Oswald Valentine.⁶³

      The North Devon headland had charms not only for Walter. His father was inspired by the rugged coastal landscape. One of his paintings, worked up from sketches made that summer, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. It was Oswald Sickert’s first exposure at Burlington House, and built upon his showings at the New Water Colour Society, the Dudley Gallery, and Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ in Pall Mall.⁶⁴ The achievement gave Walter a first, vicarious, savour of the Academy’s extraordinary power as the arbiter of contemporary taste and artistic prestige. It was a pungent taste and one that both attracted and repelled him.

^* ‘Sky blue’ was a slang term for bread-and-milk.

^* An echo of his happy time with the milkmaids at Mortehoe perhaps lingers in his 1910 rhapsody upon the glorious physical presence of Juno, in Raphael’s The Council of the Gods at the Villa Farnesiana, Rome, with her ‘fleshy lustrous face, like one of Rowlandson’s wenches’; her hands, he remarks approvingly, ‘are gross,