Sickert called next on Degas at his flat in rue Pigalle. It was to prove a momentous meeting. Degas was then forty-eight. A crusty bachelor with an acerbic wit, he was developing a reputation as a curmudgeon, if not a recluse. There were few artists in Paris who were not a little scared of him and of his sharp-edged tongue. Sickert, if he knew anything of this, was undaunted by it. Many years later, he gave an account of his visit through what he described as the ‘piquant distorting media’ of Oscar Wilde’s recollection of Degas’ story of the incident:
Degas alleged himself to have been disturbed too early in the morning, by a terrific knocking, and ringing. He had opened the door himself, his head tied up in a flannel comforter. ‘Here at last,’ he said to himself, ‘is the Englishman who is going to buy all my pictures’. ‘Monsieur’, he had said, ‘je ne peux pas vous recevoir. J’ai une bronchite qui me mène au diable. Je regrette’. ‘Cela ne fait rien’, the Englishman is here made to say. ‘Je n’aime pas la conversation. Je viens voir vos tableaux. Je suis l’élève de Whistler. Je vous présente le catalogue de mon maître’ … The visitor had then entered, and proceeded, silently, and with great deliberation to examine all the pictures in the flat, and the wax statuettes under their glass cases, keeping the invalid standing the while, and had ended by ‘Bien. Très bien. Je vous donne rendezvous demain à votre atelier à dix heures’.
The facts, Sickert admitted, were ‘singularly exact’.73
Sickert, true to his intention, followed up the call with a visit to Degas’ studio in the rue Fontaine St Georges. The artist’s consternation at his assured young visitor seems to have quickly dissolved into amusement. Degas’ ‘rollicking and somewhat bear-like sense of fun’ came to the fore. It became his joke to regard Sickert as ‘the typical and undiluted’ Englishman, the authority on all matters of English life and etiquette. He bombarded him with stories of other Englishmen he had known and the foolish things they had said, and quizzed him upon points of national custom. But Degas must have recognized, too, Sickert’s real interest in art, and they found common ground in their admiration of Charles Keene.74
Sickert was amazed to discover the high regard in which Keene was held by the French Impressionists, several of whom, he learnt, preserved collections of his work cut from the pages of Punch ‘as models of style’.75 To them, he was ‘the first of the moderns’.76 Fascinated by his command of chiaroscuro, they regarded him as a fellow ‘painter’, rather than as a draughtsman.77 They were as interested in his backgrounds as his figures, praising his depiction of landscape – ‘his snowy streets, his seascapes, his bits of country life’ – as ‘unequalled’.78 Monet and Sisley, Sickert was told, derived their handling of trees in sunlight directly from Keene’s drawings of the ‘rampant foliage’ of London squares and country gardens.79 Keene saw things ‘never seen before’; he observed the reflected lights in the shadows and depicted them in lines drawn with diluted ink.80 These revelations reinforced Sickert’s appreciation of his hero, and reinforced, too, his understanding of the dynamic relation between drawing and painting.
It was a relationship that Sickert could trace in Degas’ own work. He drank in all that was on view: the ballet scenes, the studies of millinery shops, the figure drawings. There were points of contact with Whistler’s art – the engagement with scenes of modern urban life, the fascination with low tone – but there was also the hint of something new: the unconscious drama of people in interiors, the conscious drama of the popular stage, the effects of artificial light, and the sense of pictures not conjured out of paint but built up, planned, and composed in stages from drawings and studies. The full significance of such differences was not at once apparent to Sickert. For the moment it was enough to know that he liked Degas’ pictures, and that Degas seemed to like him.
The trip to Paris gave Sickert a broadening sense of French art, and of the Impressionists.81 This process of education continued back in England. Durand-Ruel held another exhibition in London that spring,82 and Whistler began having sittings from Théodore Duret, a successful wine merchant who was also the champion and friend of the Impressionists. Sickert worked alongside Whistler, producing his own small portrait sketch of the bearded Duret, and learning more of Manet, Degas, and their contemporaries.83
Through much of 1883, Ellen continued to be troubled by her ailments. Her younger sister, Annie, had already beaten her to the registry office (marrying T. J. Sanderson, a reluctant lawyer, would-be bookbinder, and disciple of William Morris),84 and it was becoming increasingly clear that her own wedding, planned for that summer, would have to be postponed. Ellen did not join Walter and the rest of his family for a late holiday at St Ives.
Thanks to the arrival of the railway, the little Cornish fishing village was already becoming a magnet for artists and holidaymakers. Amongst the families on the beach that year was Leslie Stephen with his wife, young son, and two daughters – Virginia and Vanessa. Although Sickert thought Mr Stephen looked enormously ‘impressive’ and Mrs Stephen quite ‘superb’, he did not attempt to make their acquaintance.85 It was the real life of the place that drew his attention rather than its artistic and holiday existence. He assumed a jersey and top boots and ‘completely won over’ the local fishermen, ‘fascinating them with his kindly bonhomie’.86
He did, nevertheless, do some pictures, amongst them a charming little panel of some children sitting on the beach, which in its lightness and brightness – as well as its novel accent upon the figures – perhaps owed something to his recent Parisian discoveries. (Sickert gave the picture to his housekeeper at Markham Square, to show her that he was not completely wedded to the tones of what she called ‘London Mud’.)87 To be out sketching on the beach was to be amongst fellow artists, and Sickert found himself engaged in conversation with a young painter called Alberto Ludovici. Ludovici was the son of a well-known artist of the same name, and, although still only in his twenties, he had been drawn into the art establishment. Already he was a member of the Society of British Artists, a prestigious if rather stuffy group and a would-be nursery to the Royal Academy, of which his father was treasurer. Young Ludovici was interested to meet a pupil of the infamous Whistler, while Sickert was intrigued to meet a man so well connected to the art institutions of the capital. They parted in the expectation of seeing each other again in London.88
At the end of the summer, when the holiday visitors returned to town, Sickert stayed on and was joined by Whistler and Menpes for a winter painting tour. They all lodged with an old lady