For Walter, however, he had an additional attraction. He was a close friend of Whistler. Sickert’s commitment to a career on the stage had done nothing to diminish his passionate interest in the American painter. At the Grosvenor Gallery show that spring, the picture that impressed him most was Whistler’s Golden Girl.16 Godwin could tell him more about his hero. He, after all, had designed Whistler’s home, the elegant and austere White House in Tite Street, Chelsea, along with much of its furniture. The two men had collaborated on projects: they had created an exhibition stand together for the Paris Exposition Universelle the previous year. They shared a common passion for Japanese art and blue-and-white china. They were both members of the St Stephen’s Club and saw much of each other there.
If Sickert’s connection with Godwin brought him closer to Whistler’s world, it did not quite bring him into Whistler’s presence. It was Ellen Terry who, according to legend, was responsible for first drawing Sickert to his hero’s attention. It happened one evening at the Lyceum when Walter was not on duty. Wishing to throw a bunch of violets to Ellen at the curtain call, and anxious that it should carry over the footlights, he weighted his bouquet with lead shot. He rather overestimated the amount needed, and the flowers, after spinning through the air, dropped to the stage with a very audible clunk right next to the greatly surprised Henry Irving. Whistler, who was in the house that night, noted this miniature drama with amusement and took the trouble to discover its perpetrator.17
The two men met soon afterward. From the beginning of May the Forbes-Robertsons hosted a soirée each Friday at their house in Charlotte Street.18 They were exciting and crowded occasions: Mr Forbes-Robertson had a wide connection, and his offspring were numerous, talented, successful, charming, and gregarious. At their parties the worlds of art, letters, and the stage met and the generations mingled. Walter could encounter young actresses and old lions.19 Oscar Wilde, just down from Oxford and embarked upon a career of self-advertisement and poetical affectation, was a regular guest. So was Whistler. It was almost certainly in the crowded studio at Charlotte Street that Sickert was first introduced to his hero.20 The meeting, however, though momentous, was brief, and it was only on the following day, when Sickert by chance saw Whistler entering a tobacconist’s shop and followed him in, that he asked if he might call at his studio.21
Whistler, though he consented, barely had a studio in which to receive his young admirer. Overwhelmed by legal bills after his pyrrhic victory in the Ruskin trial, he had been declared bankrupt at the beginning of May.22 His collections of oriental china and Japanese prints had been sold off at auction along with many of his own works. The bailiffs were in possession of the White House, and bills were already posted announcing its imminent sale. Dispirited but not crushed by these setbacks, Whistler continued to live on in the denuded house, and to keep up a front of spirited defiance. A semblance of the old life continued. It was said that he pressed the bemused bailiffs into service at his Sunday breakfast parties. He found both the time and the heart to show Sickert over his studio. Although much had been sold, and not a little destroyed (to prevent it falling into the hands of his creditors), there was still plenty to admire.
Sickert wrote enthusiastically to Pollard: ‘I went to see Whistler the other day. He showed me some glorious work of his and it was of course a great pleasure to me to talk with him about painting. Such a man! The only painter alive who has first immense genius, then conscientious persistent work striving after his ideal[,] he knowing exactly what he is about and turned aside by no indifference or ridicule.’23 The account betrayed a depth of engagement that went beyond Sickert’s more conventional excitement at the deeds of Irving and Terry.
The tension between his theatrical ambitions and his artistic interests was quickened that summer. In August, when most of the London theatres closed, Walter accompanied the rest of the family to Dieppe. They had rented the Maison Bellevue, Miss Slee’s old school house on the heights of Neuville, for the holidays. The school had finally closed, but Miss Slee herself was still in residence. She was not the only addition to the Sickert party that summer. Various other friends came to stay, and Oscar Wilde accepted an invitation from Mrs Sickert to spend some time with them. Walter was initially suspicious of Wilde, considering him something of a poseur; but he was willing to suspend his verdict because, as he explained to Pollard, ‘firstly E[llen] T[erry] likes him and 2ndly he likes me’.24 Extended exposure encouraged him in this revised opinion. Wilde, beneath the deliberate extravagances of his manner, had real charm. Besides winning over the sceptical Walter, he was a source of delight to the rest of the family. His laughter was ceaseless and contagious. He played happily with Oswald and Leo, and made a special bond with Helena, then a bright but rather bolshy 15-year-old. He would discuss poetry with her, despite her determination to go to Cambridge – the Scientific University. When he caught her frowning doubtfully at the improbable tales he invented for Oswald and Leo’s amusement, he would appeal to her in a tone of mock anguish, ‘You don’t believe me, Miss Nelly. I assure you … well, it’s as good as true.’25
One afternoon he read – or chanted – his Newdigate Prize poem, ‘Ravenna’, to the assembled company as they sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard:
A year ago I breathed the Italian air
And yet methinks this Northern spring is fair …
It was a mellifluous performance, punctuated only by Miss Slee’s schoolmarmish insistence on correcting some minor point of pronunciation, an interruption that Wilde took with good humour.26 Sadly, he was not on hand to help Walter write a comic playlet for the company to act: Walter could have done with the assistance (he felt ‘totally devoid of fancy & originality’ in the field of comic writing) and Wilde might have discovered his true vocation earlier.27
Another visitor was Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was on a walking holiday. His theatrical career was advancing swiftly. He had just been engaged by Irving for the forthcoming season at the Lyceum.28 Although he complained to Helena that he was usually cast in character parts – often as old men – even his geriatric disguises could not quite obliterate his broad-browed, straight-nosed good looks, nor muffle his perfect diction (learnt, so he claimed, from Phelps). At the age of twenty-six, he was beginning to gain the status of a stage idol. And yet he still managed to combine this achievement with his first love: painting. He continued to work on portraits – often of theatrical figures – in the studio at Charlotte Street.29
To Sickert, Forbes-Robertson’s life must have seemed both charmed and desirable: rather than having to decide between painting and acting, he had chosen both. Might he himself not follow suit, and become a star of the London stage and an acknowledged artist? For the moment, however, both goals remained frustratingly out of reach. And the vision paralysed almost more than it inspired him. He lapsed, as he told Pollard, in to ‘such despair about [himself]’ that he was unable to work. ‘As to painting,’ he confessed, ‘I have done nothing.’ He spent most of his time lying in the orchard reading Thackeray: Vanity Fair he pronounced ‘very perfect’.30
Nevertheless he returned to London with a sense of gathering resolve. Although he was still ‘appearing’ rather than ‘acting’ at the Lyceum, he sought to speed up the pace of his progress by mounting some drawing-room theatricals of his own. Together with his friend Justin Huntly M’Carthy