It was clear that Walter had begun to strain the bounds of both home and school life. At King’s College School he had certainly gained that intellectual ‘confidence’ from ‘knowing a little about something’ which he came to regard as the goal of good schooling. At the beginning of 1878, Dr Maclear wrote to Professor Reginald Poole at the British Museum, recommending Walter for a possible post in the Coins and Medals department.50 Mrs Sickert was very grateful for this initiative. There was a tone of real relief in her letter of thanks to Maclear for his good offices: ‘I assure you that we are very grateful to you for your kindness in helping [Walter] to what we believe to be most congenial work. We sincerely believe that [he] will show himself to be worthy of your good opinion and hope that you will continue to feel a kindly interest in him.’51 A job would have the double benefit of occupying Walter’s energies and relieving the Sickerts’ domestic finances.
Anne Sheepshanks, the family’s guardian angel, had died two years previously – in February 1876 – and while Mrs Sickert’s allowance was continued it was not increased. (After various bequests to Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Royal Astronomical Society, the bulk of Anne Sheepshanks’ estate had been left in trust for the support of her last surviving sibling, the recently widowed Susanna Levett.52) Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1878 the Sickerts moved from their home in Notting Hill across to the other side of Hyde Park, to 12 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington. The new house – a three-storey semi-detached villa with an ‘extra wing’ – was bigger, if only slightly, than Hanover Terrace. Built just fifteen years before, with an eye to suggesting, rather than providing, a modest grandeur, the rooms were all too high for their width, and the staircases too narrow to allow two people to pass. The rent – at £90 a year – marked an increase in the family expenses, and must have made the prospect of Walter entering paid employment additionally attractive.53
But it was not to be. Professor Poole was after a pure classicist rather than an all-round linguist. He was impressed by Sickert, however, and offered to assist him if he wished to reapply for another post at a later date.54 Walter returned to school at the start of 1878 and ‘settled down to work in the matriculation class’.55 He enjoyed the challenge of exams and, concentrating his energies, passed with First Class honours.56
His academic achievements were such that they might perhaps have been expected to lead on to university – his friend Alfred Pollard had already gone up to Oxford with a scholarship.57 But the expense of a university education was beyond the Sickert budget.58 Walter, it was recognized, must get a job. Initially, when consulted by his father – during one of their walks together on Wormwood Scrubs – as to his hopes for the future, he had suggested rather unhelpfully that he intended to be ‘An Universalgenie’ (he had been reading a life of Goethe).59 Universal geniuses, however, were not a commodity in the employment market. Besides, Walter’s own views came into sharper focus during his last year of schooling. He was, his sister recalled, ‘in no doubt that his vocation lay in painting’.60
This was the last thing that his parents wanted to hear. Oswald Sickert had dedicated his life to art and was keenly aware that he had not made his living from it. Although the evidence of great artistic fortunes was everywhere to hand – visible in the huge studio-palaces of Melbury Road, Holland Park – such riches were beyond his reach. And they were receding further. The high watermark of Victorian prosperity was already passing. Painting was an overcrowded profession, and Oswald Sickert was being crowded out. He had come to regard himself as a failure.61 It was the Sheepshanks’ allowance rather than the meagre returns from any sales he might make that paid the household bills. And the Sheepshanks’ resources were finite: they could not stretch to provide Walter with the sort of prolonged and dedicated training that Oswald had enjoyed at Munich and Paris. Besides, although he had ‘a great opinion of Walter’s abilities in general’, neither he nor Mrs Sickert believed that they were ‘specialised in painting’.62 He did everything possible to discourage his son from following him in what he described as his ‘chien de métier’.63
In the face of such opposition, Walter made some efforts in alternative directions. He considered applying for the higher division of the Home Civil Service. But this, he discovered, would require three years’ coaching, which would be just as expensive as university.64 He wrote to Professor Poole, asking if places at the British Museum Library might ‘be got separately from [such] general Examinations … and if you think there would be any chance for me’.65 The answer did not encourage him to pursue this course. His father urged him towards any career where he would be sure of earning a living.66 The law was suggested, and given serious consideration67 – although this, too, unless begun in a lowly clerical capacity, would have required some expensive training.
Beyond these conventional options a more tempting vista beckoned. The stage. Extraordinarily, the idea was not thrown out of court. But then, compared to Oswald Sickert’s ‘dog of a profession’, acting had various attractions. It was not a calling that the Sickerts knew to be unremunerative – even if this was only because they knew very little about it at all. It was no longer socially beyond the pale, at least not in the artistic circles frequented by the Sickerts; and, unlike almost all other professions, it required no formal and expensive training, and no fees of entry.
They were encouraged, too, by the example of their friends the Forbes-Robertsons. John Forbes-Robertson, a prolific art journalist and lecturer, lived with his wife and five children in a large house in Charlotte Street, just off Bedford Square.68 His eldest son, Johnston, although having begun an art training at the RA schools, had been obliged ‘by force of circumstances’ to give it up and seek a more immediately rewarding career.69 He had found it on the stage. A family friend had got him a small part in a play at the Princess Theatre. And from that beginning he had managed to make his own way as an actor. He had performed in Samuel Phelps’s company, acted with Ellen Terry on her triumphant return to the London stage, and was steadily in work.70 His younger brother, Ian, was just about to embark upon the same path.71 Here were models for emulation. And if the stage offered little security, it was at least susceptible to energy and talent, and Walter – it seemed – had both.
He rounded off his school career, at the end-of-year Prize Day, by giving a stirring performance as Cardinal Wolsey in a selection of scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.72 To his proud parents, appreciative teachers, and admiring peers, it must have seemed only too likely that he would succeed on his chosen path.
* The ‘Modern Division’ offered a less rigorously