One of Sickert’s abiding memories of Degas that summer was that he was ‘always humming with enthusiasm’ airs from Ernest Reyer’s popular opera Sigurd. He had seen the piece over thirty times since its opening in 1884 (his attendance rate had been helped by the fact that he had been granted the privilege of free entry to the Opera earlier that year), but it is tempting to suppose that his choice of it was in part prompted by the homophony between Sickert and Sigurd.23 Certainly Degas did pay the occasional musical tribute to his young friend, referring to him as ‘le jeune et beau Sickert’, in a phrase adapted from the song about ‘le jeune et beau Dunois’.24 It was a telling mark of the real amity that grew up between them. The rapport established over those first meetings in Paris two years earlier was built upon. There is an informal photograph of the pair: Sickert standing beside his hero, eager, happy, and alert, with pointed beard, paint box, and straw hat. Degas, as Fantin-Latour had observed to Sickert, was ‘un personnage trop enseignant’ (a too ‘teaching’ personage),25 but this was a quality exactly calculated to appeal to an ambitious young painter, thirsty for knowledge. They went about together, Sickert imbibing all that he could of Degas’ ‘teaching’. On one informal sketching expedition, made together with Blanche, Helleu, and some others into the fields behind the castle, Degas said something that Sickert considered of ‘sufficient importance never to be forgotten’: ‘“I always tried,” he said, “to urge my colleagues to seek for new combinations along the path of draughtsmanship, which I consider a more fruitful field than that of colour. But they wouldn’t listen to me, and have gone the other way”.’ This observation, Sickert noted, was made ‘not at all as a grievance, but rather as a hint of advice to us’. The exact meaning of the hint, if not immediately clear, returned Sickert to the idea that drawing might be the key to painting.26
Sickert also had the chance to watch Degas at work, when he posed as one of a portrait group that Degas made at Blanche’s studio. Working in pastel, Degas began by drawing Sickert, standing in his covert coat at the edge of the group, looking, as it were, off stage. Then he ‘gradually added’ one figure after another – Boulanger-Cavé, Ludovic Halévy, Gervex, Blanche, and Daniel Halévy – each figure ‘growing on to the next in a series of eclipses, and serving, in its turn, as a point de repère for each further accretion’.27 It was a mode of approach that related to the theory of drawing that Sickert had already learnt at Tite Street. Other aspects of Degas’ practice were, however, less familiar to the pupil of Whistler. When they had first taken up their pose, Ludovic Halévy had pointed out to Degas that the collar of Sickert’s coat was half turned up. He was about to adjust it when Degas called out: ‘“Laissez. C’est bien.” Halévy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Degas cherche toujours l’accident”.’28 On another occasion, during a rest in proceedings, Degas invited Gervex (then a young man under thirty) to come and inspect the work in progress. As Sickert recalled the moment, Gervex,
in the most natural manner in the world, advance[d] to the sacred easel, and, after a moment or two of plumbing and consideration, point[ed] out a suggestion. The greatest living draughtsman resumed his position at the easel, plumbed for himself, and, in the most natural manner in the world, accepted the correction. I understood on that day, once for all, the proper relation between youth and age. I understood that in art, as in science, youth and age are equal. I understood that they both stand equally corrected before a fact.29
Sickert was not yet quite confident of his own command of the ‘facts’, but he felt that he was advancing in accomplishment.
He strove to impress Degas with his dedication to work. Ignoring the claims of the holiday season – to say nothing of the honeymoon – he would set off each day armed with his pochade box to record the beach and the town.30 It was a very productive summer. Inspired by Degas’ electrifying presence, Sickert found himself painting with a new fluency and confidence, ‘running in’, as he put it, ‘without conscious operation’. It was ‘an astounding difference’.31 All things seemed possible. Though he did attempt some larger works (which he left hanging out of the windows to dry), most of his output that summer was small in scale – little ‘sunlight pochades’.*32 In what was surely a homage to Degas’ example he painted a small scene of the Dieppe Race Course.33
Degas came to inspect Sickert’s paintings at the rue Sygogne, and was generous in his praise. He admired their finish. Passing the tips of his fingers over the smooth surface of the little panels he ‘commended the fact that they were “peint comme une porte” [painted like a door]’.34 ‘La nature est lisse’ (Nature is smooth), he was fond of saying.35 He did, however, raise a first doubt about the Whistlerian absence of detail and human interest in Sickert’s pictures. He urged Sickert to look at the works of Eugène Boudin, the painter of small-scale beach scenes who had inspired many of the Impressionists.36 It was an important tip. As Sickert came to realize, where Whistler and some of the other Impressionists ‘tended to use their figures rather as spots to accentuate their landscapes’, Boudin proceeded ‘in reverse order, from the actors to the scenery’.37 Degas also questioned another of Sickert’s Whistlerian traits: his fondness for low tones. Inspecting some of his darker pictures he remarked, ‘tout ça a un peu l’air de se passer la nuit’ (it all seems a bit like something taking place at night).38
Buoyed up by these signs of Degas’ effectual interest, Sickert’s energy was irrepressible. George Moore, who was over on holiday, thought that no one had ever been ‘as young as Sickert was that summer at Dieppe’. He recalled him ‘coming in at the moment of sunset, his paint-box over his shoulders, his mouth full of words and laughter, his body at exquisite poise, and himself as unconscious of himself as a bird on a branch’.39
Sickert’s mounting self-assurance did, however, lead to some moments of unexpected comedy. One chance encounter came to haunt him. Taken by a French acquaintance to see ‘a comrade of his, no longer a youth, who was thinking of throwing up a good berth in some administration in order to give himself up entirely to the practice of painting’, Sickert was introduced to a sturdy man with a black moustache and a bowler hat. ‘I am ashamed to say,’ Sickert recalled, ‘that the sketch I saw him doing left no very distinct impression on me, and that I expressed the opinion that the step he contemplated was rather imprudent than otherwise … his name was Gauguin.’40
A happier meeting took place outside the Dieppe fishmarket when Sickert was able to introduce Degas to his father. Oswald Sickert was working on a pastel of the Quai Henri IV, which Degas generously and genuinely admired.* Walter was delighted to be able to bring together two of his artistic progenitors. He was becoming prodigal of artistic