They finally left Sutherland in the second week of October. It took them five days to get home. There were stops not only at Haworth but also at Inverness, Berwick, and York. At York they spent one uncomfortable night at the Leopard, an old inn close to the Minster which Walter seems to have visited during the Yorkshire leg of his Henry V tour, and had been recommending fulsomely to everyone ‘for the last year.’ The Cobden sisters did not share his enthusiasm for the quaint old place. Having groped their way up a pitch-black stairway and been led through a billiard room, they were shown into a tiny bedroom, like ‘the garrets in Hogarth’s pictures’. They insisted on swapping with Walter, who had a slightly less garret-like room on the floor below, but it was a scant improvement. They got no sleep: all night the clock struck the quarters, and in the early hours a large wagon rolled by sounding, as Nellie said, ‘like the Tower of Babel passing’. When they escaped in the morning, they were horrified and amused to meet a London friend – a young clergyman – looking up at the sign and preparing to enter, having been recommended the place by Walter too.133
It is not known whether the Cobden sisters saved the man from his ordeal. They certainly moved to save themselves from any further discomfort. ‘After a great deal of trouble we have taught Walter the difference between an Inn & a Public House,’ wrote Maggie. ‘The dear Leopard is unfortunately the latter.’134 This, of course, is probably what attracted Sickert to it. He was already beginning to develop a relish for the popular, the sordid, and the authentic, for that characterful world first distilled ‘in Hogarth’s pictures’.
The ten weeks that Walter spent at Rispond House marked a watershed. They provided an unprecedented chance for concentrated work and also for concentrated intimacy with Nellie Cobden. It was an opportunity, too, to plan for the future. He had come of age at the end of May and his formal entry into adulthood may have quickened his sense of resolve. By the end of the holiday he had taken two important decisions. He enrolled for a course at the Slade School of Art, and he became engaged to Nellie. The two things may even have been connected.
Helena Sickert recorded that, at this juncture, Walter was ‘helped to follow his true vocation’, while Sickert’s friend and first biographer Robert Emmons states more boldly that Oswald Sickert, ‘seeing that [Nellie Cobden] had a fortune of her own … agreed to his son’s giving up the stage’.135 This, however, may be overstating the case. Nellie certainly wanted to help Walter. She loved him and had come to regard him as a rare talent. And for all her proclaimed belief in feminine independence she regarded it as particularly her vocation to assist the genius of others. As one of her friends noted, ‘she took the part of men and women whose dreams went far and farther than far, provided always they had the courage of their desires’. It seemed to her that to ‘be born with wings and not to fly’ was ‘the commonest tragedy’ of modern life.136 She wanted Walter to escape that fate; she hoped to help him spread his wings and launch himself into the air. Shelley was her ideal (‘as near perfection as human nature had so far reached’),137 and there was, to her, something Shelley-like about Sickert, with his blond locks, his intense energy, his burning commitment. Nevertheless, while she felt sure of his genius, she – like Mr and Mrs Sickert – was not yet quite certain where that genius lay: in the studio or on the stage.
Walter himself was in no hurry to abandon acting completely. His Slade course was only for one year, and the hours were not long. They did not preclude the possibility of theatrical engagements, or eclipse the vision of an artistic reputation being supported by a brilliant stage career. His first step towards a formal art training did little more than mark a tilt in balance between the two spheres of his ambition. It was agreed that Walter and Ellen’s engagement should be for eighteen months: they would marry in the summer of 1883. In the meantime, Walter would continue to live at home, and the arrangement would be kept as a family secret.138 Perhaps after that period the outlines of Walter’s future would be clearer.
The reaction of Nellie’s sisters to the engagement was mixed. Maggie and Annie (as well as Jessie Thomas) were all conventionally ‘delighted’, while Jane Cobden thought ‘Nellie ought to have gone in for a Cabinet Minister’. Maggie, however, confided to Dolla Richmond that Walter was one of the very few people that she herself could have imagined being married to, adding the rather unconvincing caveat, ‘mind, I wasn’t in love with him’. She drew what consolation she could from the thought that others might be similarly disappointed: ‘Won’t there be a shrieking over the length & breadth of the land when [the engagement] is made known.’139
Having decided upon enrolling at an art school, Sickert’s choice of the Slade was all but inevitable. He had spent the previous five years consorting with Slade students, Gower Street was familiar territory to him, and Alphonse Legros, the head of the school, belonged to that same mid-century Parisian art world in which Oswald Sickert, Otto Scholderer, Fantin-Latour, and Whistler had been schooled – indeed Legros, Fantin, and Whistler had formed a short-lived triumvirate, le Groupe de Trois. Sickert first attended on 18 October 1881, two weeks after the beginning of the new term, and almost a week after his return from Scotland.140 Whatever his hopes for the course, they soon foundered. The atmosphere of the school was severe, muted, and academic. The high spirits of the Slade rabble-rousers found no echo inside the teaching studios. The sexes were segregated, classes were small, and the general standard low. First-year students were expected to work exclusively from the cast, toiling from morning to late afternoon with greasy ‘Italian chalk’ to set down on large sheets of unforgiving ‘Ingres paper’ the planes and shadows of some classical figure or Renaissance bust. Legros himself, with his sober, baleful features and grey-flecked beard, was a distant figure. Unable, or unwilling, to speak English, despite his long years of residence – and his marriage to an Englishwoman – he communicated largely through his assistants and subordinates. His comments were terse, his direct instruction limited to painting the occasional demonstration picture in front of the class.141
Sickert’s later verdict on his teacher was harsh, and grew harsher over the years. He recognized the sincerity and, indeed, the achievement of Legros’ art – particularly his etching and his imaginative paintings,142 and he concurred in his deep respect for tradition and the work of the old masters. But he felt that, as a teacher, he was a failure. It was not his métier.
‘Legros,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘has been spoken of as a great teacher, which he wasn’t … A great teacher vivifies not one or two, but hundreds of students directly, and, indirectly, countless ones. He reclaims whole intellectual territories into cultivation, and leaves his mark on generations.’ On all these fronts Legros failed. His professorship, moreover, ‘depleted his creative energy, instead of nourishing it’.
A great teacher is refreshed and inspired,