Arthur Kennedy took Sickert and other Slade friends to Burne-Jones’s house in the North End Road, West Kensington. There they were allowed to look over the artist’s studio and inspect his pictures of gracefully androgynous beings with retroussé noses looking pale and interesting amongst garlands of improbably detailed flora. Sickert was impressed, but grudgingly so. He recognized Burne-Jones as a ‘brilliant draughtsman’ but remained only half-attracted – and half repelled – by his paintings. The realm of ‘strange and exquisite fancy’ that the artist had created, though undeniably powerful, was impossibly alien to Sickert, who possessed almost no sense of ‘fancy’, exquisite or otherwise.41 Nevertheless, despite his artistic reservations he found himself connected – albeit loosely – to this ardent Pre-Raphaelite world. His sister, Helena, now fourteen, was attending Notting Hill High School and had become friendly both with Burne-Jones’s daughter, Margaret, and William Morris’s two girls, Jenny and Mary (known as ‘Jennyanmay’). They often spent their weekends at each other’s houses; Helena would borrow copies of Morris’s beautifully produced Kelmscott books and bring them home. Both Morris and Burne-Jones called on the Sickerts, while Morris’s disciple, William de Morgan, was already known to the family through his connection with the Sheepshanks.42
Sickert encountered Burne-Jones’s work again later in that summer of 1877 at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street. It was the art event of the year. The Grosvenor was a new phenomenon. There had been commercial galleries before, but none conceived on such a scale, nor carried off with such taste. Established by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, it was to be a veritable ‘Temple of Art’, offering the discerning public the chance to see the most up-to-date work in surroundings that suggested an idealized drawing room, or ‘some old Venetian palace’, rather than an overcrowded auction house.43 Burne-Jones was the star of the show, represented by, amongst other major works, The Seven Days of Creation, The Mirror of Venus, and The Beguiling of Merlin. There were pictures by his followers and rivals, minutely detailed, richly coloured representations of myth and legend. One wall glowed with the brooding metaphorical figure-paintings of G. F. Watts, another with the serene, soft-tinted classical beauties of Albert Moore. But it was not these that excited the 17-year-old Sickert. His attention was arrested by three tall canvases hung to the left of the door in the ‘large gallery’. All were interesting, and one was particularly well calculated to appeal: a portrait of Henry Irving as Phillip II of Spain. They were the work of the American-born, Paris-trained artist, James McNeill Whistler.
Sickert, by his own rather heightened account, experienced an artistic epiphany:
To a few, a very few, these and the other [five] canvases by Whistler [on view] came as a revelation, a thing of absolute conviction, admitting of no doubt or hesitation. Here was the finger of God. The rest became mere paint. Excellent, meritorious, worthy, some of it was, but it was mere paint and canvas. Here a thin girl, now in white muslin with black bows, now in a fur jacket and hat, breathed into being without any means being apparent. She stood, startled, in those narrow frames, and stared at you, with white face and red lips, out of nowhere whence she had emerged. There was a blue sea and a sandy shore, with a man in a light grey coat – Courbet, as I afterwards learnt. There was a snow scene in London in a fog, with a draggled little figure shuffling towards a lighted window. No one who was not there can imagine the revelation which these canvases were at that time.44
To most observers the revelation was an unwelcome one. To Millais and W. P. Frith, Whistler was a ‘a sort of Gorgon’s head’, while a critical establishment that set store by subject matter, sentiment, fine detail, and high finish, found his muted, ‘impressionistic’, often subjectless pictures all but incomprehensible.45 Their titles – which borrowed from the vocabulary of music: ‘Nocturne’, ‘Symphony’, ‘Arrangement’ – were an affront to sense. The pictures might be ‘clever’; indeed – according to Millais – they were ‘a damned sight too clever!’ They were certainly alien, and probably dangerous. And like most ingenious alien dangers, they seemed to have their origins in modern France. Whistler, it was acknowledged, was a practitioner of something called ‘Impressionism’, although just what ‘Impressionism’ might be, most critics thought it safest not to enquire too closely: it was enough to know that it came from France and that Whistler was its sole advocate in England. He was also an advocate who demanded a hearing.
Whistler, at forty-three, was already a conspicuous figure. His distinct and dandified appearance – unruly black locks set off by a shock of white hair, Mephistophelean moustache, monocle, wasp-waisted coat, short cane, top hat and Yankee swagger – was fixed by the caricaturists. His astringent comments and sharp witticisms were reported, not infrequently by himself, in the press. His Sunday ‘breakfast’ parties, which lasted most of the afternoon, were notorious. His views on art, interior decoration, oriental porcelain, and gallery design were proclaimed with a self-assurance that often crossed the borders of arrogance. These were things not likely to put off an admiring teenager. Whistler was set up beside Keene and Irving in Sickert’s select personal pantheon.
He was a deity in need of adherents. If the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition had a profound effect on Sickert’s life, it had an even deeper one on Whistler’s. Amongst the pictures he exhibited was one – not much remarked by Sickert – called Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a small canvas of dark blue-blacks scattered – if not spattered – with points of brightness: the image of a firework display. This was the painting that so enraged Ruskin, the ageing arbiter of Victorian artistic taste: the pot of paint flung in the public’s face, for which Whistler had the ‘cockney impudence’ to be asking two hundred guineas. Whistler responded to Ruskin’s intemperate critique with a writ of libel.46
The action drew a battle line through the British art world. Neutrality was all but impossible. Those who were not with Whistler were against him. And most people were against him. The feelings of bafflement, irritation, and scorn that Whistler’s art already engendered in the mind of the gallery-going public became intensified and took on a personal edge as the legal process advanced during 1878. When the case was heard in November, Burne-Jones and W. P. Frith both appeared against Whistler in the witness box; others spoke against him in the press, the studio, and the drawing room. Only a bold few rallied to his standard. Sickert, of course, was of their number. If he did not attend the trial, he followed its progress and lamented its conclusion: Whistler, with much shrillness and no little wit, won the verdict, but gained only a farthing’s damages, a huge legal bill, and the general disapprobation of the public. To Sickert, however, he remained a hero. And when, crowing over his nominal victory, Whistler published an annotated transcript of the proceedings, Sickert bought a copy.47
Walter’s independent life amongst the unchaperoned worlds of the art school and the stage was the cause of some concern at home. Edith, the daughter of Hugh Carter, recalled that as a child she heard Mrs Sickert lamenting, ‘I don’t know what to do about Walter, he is so wayward’, after which pronouncement she (though only aged about five) would not let Walter hold her hand as he accompanied her and her brother to their kindergarten on his own way to school. ‘No,’ she informed him with the moral assurance of the young. ‘You worry your mother.’48 The main worry was Walter’s interest in girls. He had developed a crush on Edith Carter’s mother, Maria, who was barely thirty and very beautiful. Indeed he described