Walter Sickert: A Life. Matthew Sturgis

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