Despite these minor ructions, a daily routine was established. The three men would set off to paint each morning (after a cooked breakfast – often of fish provided by Sickert), armed with their pochade boxes, their grey-tinted panels, and walking canes. Many of the other artists they encountered could not believe that they intended to do serious work with so little equipment. Most of the painters who gravitated to St Ives during the 1880s were inspired by a strain of realism that they saw as being derived from Courbet and his disciple Bastien-Lepage. While Whistler and his pupils worked on a tiny scale, capturing fugitive impressions of land and sea, they sought to record the scenes and settings of contemporary rural life by painting large, often highly detailed pictures direct from nature. It was a taxing business for the local peasantry who had to ‘pose’ for these scenes, and for the artists who had to work long hours in the open air. Sickert delighted in the memory of one artist who required four fishermen to hold down his easel and canvas with ropes while he worked away in a howling gale.90
While Menpes stuck close to Whistler, Sickert ‘almost invariably went off by himself’ for most of the day. But this apparent independence of spirit was tempered by the fact that the paintings he made – ‘sometimes five or six a day’ – were thoroughly Whistlerian in approach and execution.91 Sickert remained in awe of his master’s handling of the Cornish scenes. Indeed he came to regard Whistler’s pochades – done from life or immediate memory – as his real masterpieces: ‘No sign of effort, with immense result.’ It was, Sickert recognized, ‘the admirable preliminary order of his mind, the perfect peace at which his art was with itself, that enabled him to aim at and bring down quarry which, to anyone else, would have seemed intangible and altogether elusive’.92 At times, Whistler seemed almost able to command nature. A wave that he was painting appeared to Sickert to ‘hang, dog’s eared for him, for an incredible duration of seconds, while the foam creamed and curled under his brush’.93 Sickert strove to achieve the same mastery, and Whistler encouraged his efforts, giving him a ‘minute nocturne in watercolour’ that he painted as a demonstration piece from a scene they had all studied together.94
The party remained in Cornwall till January 1884. It was, in Menpes’ recollection, a ‘simple happy time’. There were occasional respites from work: days spent fishing from the rocks, with Whistler springing nimbly about in his patent leather pumps. During the long winter evenings there was scope for talk and discussion. Whistler had a chance to refine his ideas on Nature (‘a poor creature after all – as I have often told you – poor company certainly – and artistically, often offensive’).95 He also began to evolve plans for the future. Sickert’s chance encounter with Alberto Ludovici seems to have awakened a curiosity in Whistler about the Society of British Artists. He was fifty and still an outsider. Contemporaries such as Leighton and Poynter had achieved established positions at the Royal Academy. What, he began to consider, might he not accomplish with the structure and weight of an institution behind him?
Once back in London, Sickert called on Ludovici and mentioned to him Whistler’s interest in perhaps becoming a member of the SBA. This ‘surprised’ Ludovici, but also intrigued him.96 The society was in a sad way: membership was falling; the most recent exhibition had been so poorly attended as to gain a reputation amongst young couples as a ‘most convenient and quiet spot for “spooning”’.97 Whistler’s membership would certainly attract publicity. Sickert introduced his master to Ludovici, who – suitably impressed – began to canvas the SBA committee on his behalf. The members had plenty of opportunity for assessing Whistler’s work. It was much before the public that spring. His exhibition of ‘Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes’ (many of them done at St Ives) opened at Dowdeswell’s in May with the usual fanfare and the usual ‘amazing’ catalogue.
The work that Sickert had produced in Cornwall over the winter, though not publicly exhibited, was also seen. He had taken a new studio at 13 Edwardes Square, just around the corner from Pembroke Gardens. As his mother reported proudly, ‘several people whose opinions are worth hearing’ had been there and pronounced his work ‘very good & promising’.98 Théodore Duret and Jacques-Émile Blanche were both in town and were very probably amongst the visitors. And if they came, it is more than likely that they brought with them their friend, the art-loving Irish novelist George Moore.
Moore, then in his early thirties, was an extraordinary figure. Sickert had already seen the pastel portrait of him at Manet’s studio and so was familiar with the tall blond apparition: the long colourless face, bulbous eyes, and orange-tinged whiskers. There seemed something sub-aquatic about Moore. He was likened amongst other things to a codfish and a drowned fisherman. But he was an ardent lover of painting and France, as well as of literature and – so he was always bragging – women. He had lived in Paris for much of the 1870s and had even studied art there before embracing literature as his vocation. He had fraternized with the painters and poets of Montmartre and the Rive Gauche, and it was his proud boast that he had received his education over the marble-topped tables at the Nouvelle Athens – a café in the place Pigalle, where his tutors had been Manet and Degas. Along with his absinthe he had drunk in a knowledge of all the new literary and artistic movements that crackled across the Parisian cultural scene: Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, Symbolism.
In his own literary experiments Moore had veered from a flirtation with sub-Baudelarian decadence (he wrote a volume of hot-house verse and claimed to have kept a pet python) to a bracing commitment to brutal naturalism à la Zola. In his artistic sympathies, however, he remained true to the Impressionists. Though living in London, he returned often to Paris and continued to see Degas and Duret – Degas admired him, and told Sickert that he was ‘very intelligent’.99 When Manet died, Moore bought two paintings from his widow and continued to keep in touch with the evolving scene.100
In 1883 Moore had published a novel, A Modern Lover, that dealt with a fictionalized version of the British art world. The anti-hero, Lewis Seymour, a sort of debased version of the hugely successful Lawrence Alma-Tadema, compromises his artistic integrity (and a succession of women) to devote himself to producing trite, but eminently saleable, classical nudes. His dégringolade is contrasted with the career of another painter – Thompson – leader of ‘the Moderns’. Thompson is an artist