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