* The children were originally given the surname Godwin, but it was subsequently changed to Craig after Ellen had been inspired by a trip to Ailsa Craig off the coast of Scotland.
* When Ellen was appearing in Tennyson’s classical verse drama The Cup, Godwin sketched out for her a series of figures showing which attitudes – according to the evidence of archaeology – would be appropriate for her to adopt in her role as a Greek priestess.
* Sickert was confirmed in his belief that acting need not, indeed should not, be an exclusive concern when – one evening, while waiting in the wings at the Lyceum – a young actor called Arthur Wing Pinero confided to him his ambitions to be a playwright and his excitement at having had a one-act sketch accepted by Irving for use as a ‘curtain-raiser’ (The Observer, 9 December 1934).
* They had an elder sister, Kate, who since 1866 had been married to Richard Fisher. Two brothers and another sister had died in infancy.
* The exact figures are unclear. Cobden’s estate was valued at ‘under £40,000’ at his death. Although Ellen Cobden, when first setting up home, told her mother she would need an income of £250 per annum, she and her sisters appear to have been even better provided for. Jane Cobden’s nephew thought that his aunt had £1,000 a year at the time of her marriage in the early 1890s, although his may have been no more than a symbolic figure, representing substantial wealth. Annie Cobden in 1890, some ten years after her marriage, had an income of around £500 p.a., but it is probable that she had made substantial inroads into her capital by then.
* Sickert, though he tolerated and even enjoyed mess, was ‘extremely particular about cleanliness’. He had, as one friend recalled, ‘a passion for hygiene’. If he discovered that he had picked up and put on a stranger’s hat, he would wash his head at the soonest opportunity. He liked to take a daily bath (‘Letters to Florence Pash’, 3).
* Oswald Adalbert had been naturalized in June 1879.
† This is a revelation. Walter’s handwriting – as in his letters to Pollard – was terrible.
* Sickert’s ‘review’, which he described so vividly in a letter to The Times in 1934, remains a conundrum. It does not appear in the British Architect. He may – as Godwin’s son suggested – have reviewed the play for some other journal. Or perhaps he wrote about a different play. There are several other notices of Helen Maud’s performances in the British Architect during the course of the year. E. W. Godwin’s diary for 10 December reads: ‘Evening to Club. Sigurd [Sickert] came, dined at Criterion & on with him to St George’s Hall amateur performance – Still Waters [Run Deep]. Home directly it was over.’ In the next issue of the British Architect (16 December 1881, 629–30) an unsigned review appeared declaring that the play ‘had a special artistic interest for it gave us another opportunity of seeing Miss Helen Maud act. It is not often that an amateur performance leaves one with any memory or any new light; but in the nature of things, it is at amateur performances that now and again we discover the actor or actress, the unmistakable diamond embedded in the gravel. Rarely indeed do we see on any stage such refined, spontaneous acting as that which Miss Maud showed in playing Mrs Mildmay, curiously free, moreover, from the faults usually incident upon inexperience.’
Whistler inducted me into some understanding of painting.
(Walter Sickert to John Collier)
From the staid world of the Slade cast room Sickert found himself carried off into the hectic whirl of Whistler’s professional and private life. Not that there seemed to be much distinction between the two. Whistler liked to work amongst a camarade. The large studio room at the back of 13 Tite Street was almost always busy with callers, models, chaperones, sitters, and assistants. Visitors came from Paris and from across the Atlantic. And at the un-still centre of this shifting throng was Whistler himself: the focus of all attention and the source of all energy. He moved constantly about the room with the lightness, neatness, and decision of an armed butterfly: flitting from his table-palette to his canvas wielding his long-handled brushes; poring over portfolios of choice old papers; lovingly inking up his printing plates; drafting letters to the press; and all the time firing off fusillades of sharp laughter and sharper talk.
Sickert found an already established studio retinue. It included a mild-mannered lunatic – a one-time designer for Minton’s pottery – who would potter about, a shadow to the Master, making innumerable sketches on scraps of brown paper. Maud Franklin, Whistler’s slender, buck-toothed mistress, though often ill during 1882, was still in evidence as both model and student. Another more openly acknowledged pupil was the sleek, fair-haired Australian, Mortimer Menpes. Born in Adelaide in the same year as Sickert, he had come to London to study under Edward Poynter. He showed a precocious ability as an etcher, and it was after Whistler had noticed one of his student works that he had abandoned the National Art School and joined the Master’s entourage, assisting him in printing up the first set of Venice etchings.1 Beyond this inner core, a shifting group of other young artists made up a less formal, but no less devoted, honour guard. A trio of magnificently moustachioed Americans, Harper Pennington and the brothers Waldo and Julian Story, came often to the studio, as did Francis James, a delicate watercolourist of delicate flower pictures. The fashionable portraitist Frank Miles, though an object of mild derision amongst the other followers, called by almost daily from his studio across the way (a studio designed by E. W. Godwin).2
Of the older generation of Whistler’s friends, some few stayed loyal: Godwin, of course, and his young wife; Albert Moore, the painter of self-absorbed classical beauties; Thomas Way, the specialist printer who helped Whistler with his etching. Charles Keene, whose work Whistler admired greatly, was another occasional caller. The prevailing atmosphere, however, was one of youth, and not always very critical adulation. And that was how Whistler liked it. He preferred, so he said, the company of ‘les jeunes fous que vieux imbéciles’.3
There was one notable absentee. Oscar Wilde, who throughout the previous year had been a constant presence at the studio, was away lecturing in America on art and home decoration. It was a year-long tour. But news of Wilde’s triumphs percolated back to Tite Street: he made sure of it by arranging for Whistler to be sent press notices. And the reports of Wilde’s transatlantic triumphs served to sharpen the never quite concealed spice of rivalry that lay beneath the bantering friendship of the two men.*
Amongst the many who did come to Whistler’s studio, buyers and sitters were disappointingly rare. Whistler’s attempts to woo ‘Society’ at his celebrated Sunday breakfasts achieved only a limited success. Lords, ladies, and plutocrats might come to eat his food and enjoy his wine, but they persisted in regarding him and his art as a sort of ingenious joke. Indeed many of them assumed that Whistler regarded matters in the same light, and thought they were only being polite in laughing.4