Sickert’s own summer holiday was spent in Cornwall. He was part of a theatrical house party gathered by the Forbes-Robertsons at Cadgwith in the remote west of Cornwall close to Lizard Head. Johnston was there together with his brother Ian, his sisters Gertrude and Ida (already a widow in her twenties), and various other young friends. Adding a touch of cosmopolitan glamour to proceedings were the fiery Polish-born actress Madame Modjeska and her husband Count Bozertn Chiapowski. Modjeska, after a brilliant career in Poland, had emigrated to America in 1876, where, despite her rather shaky command of English, she achieved an immense success. It was in the hope of repeating this triumph that she had recently arrived in England. As an advertisement for her talents she had given a series of London matinée performances of Heartsease (an English adaptation of La Dame aux Camélias). Johnston Forbes-Robertson at once recognized her talent and made her welcome. She was delighted to escape the heat of London for the Cornish coast and remembered the holiday at Cadgwith as a magical time: ‘In that congenial circle one lived free from conventionalities, taking long walks on the beach or attending the lawn tennis games at the Rectory.’84
The hospitable rector of St Ruan’s, the Revd Frederick Jackson, was an old friend of the Forbes-Robertsons.85 Having so many theatrical celebrities suddenly on his doorstep he begged them to mount a benefit performance in aid of the church repair fund. The idea was eagerly taken up. As none of the local village halls was deemed big enough for such a gala event it was decided to give an open-air performance in the rectory garden. The local coastguards assisted in the construction of the stage: the lawn served as the auditorium, and a screen of mature trees provided the backdrop. The programme was made up of scenes from Heartsease and Romeo and Juliet (Modjeska, though almost forty, cherished an unquenchable ambition to play Shakespeare’s starcrossed lover in the land of the Bard’s birth). Johnston Forbes-Robertson took the male leads in both parts of the bill. Sickert was drafted in to play the ‘père noble’ in Heartsease, and to give himself the necessary gravitas he ordered a false beard from a London costumier. Unfortunately, it failed to arrive and he was obliged to improvise. Snipping some hairs from the tail of a white donkey, he made his own ‘Imperial’. It looked most impressive, though when, during the performance, he bent down to plant a kiss upon Modjeska’s brow at a moment of grand pathos, she almost put him off by whispering, ‘I have never been kissed by a donkey’s tail before.’86 To the end of his life Sickert regarded Modjeska as ‘the greatest actress he had known’. Certainly she was the only star he acted opposite.87
The holiday also had its unstaged dramas. One rain-sodden picnic at the nearby cove was enlivened when the lifeboat alarm was raised. The crew, which rapidly assembled, was short of several members, so Sickert, along with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and a couple of others, volunteered to stand in. They rowed round the headland into the next bay only to find it had been a false alarm. But Forbes-Robertson, who was sharing an oar with Sickert, could not help noticing that his friend was rather less concerned with the urgency of the moment than with ‘the wonderful effect of the white foam dashing against the mighty serpentine rocks’ off the rugged coast. Visual and artistic considerations were, it seems, never far from Sickert’s mind.88 And in the intervals between play rehearsals and sea rescues, there must have been opportunities for painting – and being painted. It was probably at Cadgwith that he produced his little panel titled The Orchard,89 and maybe the holiday also provided him with the opportunity to pose for Johnston Forbes-Robertson – usurping the artist’s own role of Romeo for the portrait.90
The party broke up in the middle of August.91 Sickert had to rejoin the Rignold tour up in Yorkshire. They were performing in Bradford at the beginning of September when Madame Modjeska made her debut at the Grand Theatre, Leeds. Sickert led most of his fellow cast members over to see her. If they were impressed by her acting they were amazed by her dressing room: it was equipped with ‘Hot and Cold’ running water. For days afterwards they could ‘talk & think of nothing but this miracle’.92
At the end of September the Rignold company arrived in London for a short run at the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch. Sickert was assigned lodgings in Claremont Square, at the top of the Pentonville Road. It was a first return to North London since the brief sojourn at Duncan Terrace in the 1860s. The blend of faded elegance and present grime was very different from Kensington. The tall, narrow, Georgian-brick house (just along from one in which George Cruikshank had lived) looked out not on to a central garden-square, but on to the less lovely prospect of a covered reservoir (established there by the New River Water Company). The rooms themselves, however, were pleasant, and even included a grand piano.93
No sooner was he settled back in London than he presented himself at York Place. Maggie Cobden recorded his arrival in a letter to Dolla Richmond, who was on her way back to New Zealand with her family. ‘The subject most interesting to my Dorothy rises before my mind’s eye … I opened the door to him attracted by the family knock & was much surprised to see our friend standing on the door step with very long hair & a large bunch of roses – he is improved as to appearance by his tour, being fatter & with more colour. But London is already beginning to tell. The family congregated in the hall to talk – imagine us round the oak chest – Walter to the right, rather overcome by the meeting – a little husky as to the voice which I thought to be a cold. Janie and I propped against the matting – my favourite position with a good view of the looking glass – Jessie [Thomas, the Cobdens’ cousin] dancing around after her manner with a large sunflower – Nellie arranging roses – the poor roses were overblown & fell in showers on the stone floor.’94
Although Walter begged the Cobdens not to come and see him acting at the Standard, he must have known they would. Along with their friend Theodore Beck they crept in, unheralded, two days later and were charmed by the theatre (‘a beauty inside’), noting particularly the ‘noble curve’ of the – alas, entirely empty – dress circle. They considered Walter’s acting – on the whole – ‘so much better’ than at the start of the tour; although his good notices as the ‘French Prisoner’ had perhaps rather over-encouraged him. When, with ‘his eyes rolling & stiff black hair standing upright on his head’ he dashed on to the stage, collapsed on to his knees and then – as he thought Pistol was about to kill him – rose up on them in an agony of terror, it reminded Maggie Cobden of ‘a Christmas pantomime’. Before the last scene, ‘The Grand Tableau of the Entry into London’, they sent a note round to announce their presence, and were amused to notice that when Walter next appeared on stage he was clutching the scrap of paper.95
Walter met them after the final curtain. He was on a high. He was also ravenously hungry, and on their way home together insisted on stopping at a dairy where he drank off three glasses of milk in quick succession. He escorted the Cobden girls back to York Place on the bus, then stayed to supper and went on talking late into the night. There was a sort of irresistible, if slightly manic, energy about him. Excitement, drama, self-dramatization, not untinged with self-mockery, touched everything he did over the following weeks. He spent much of his limited free time at York Place. ‘Walter is here roughly speaking from morning to night,’ Maggie reported and most of the time he was in what she described as a ‘rampant humour’.