This similarity of outward accoutrement, however, masked the subtle shifts in Sickert’s work that had occurred over the course of the summer. Degas’ influence and advice were already having an effect. Blanche considered that Sickert’s ‘petite planchettes’ – once so sombre – had transformed themselves ‘peu à peu sous l’influence de nos impressionistes’.43 He also registered a change in Sickert’s increased interest in ‘figure drawing’ and in his new accentuation of ‘decorative and architectural pattern’.44 But perhaps more significant for Sickert was seeing Whistler and Degas together. He noted the occasional tone of disparagement that Degas affected at Whistler’s grandstanding. Indeed when Sickert had first mentioned to Degas that he was ‘expecting Whistler on a visit’, the French artist had remarked, ‘Le rôle de papillon doit être bien fatigant, allez! J’aime mieux, moi, être le vieux boeuf, quoi?’† It was a first inkling for Sickert of the sometimes overstrained tension that Whistler set up between his public pose and his private practice as a painter.45 And it was reinforced by other similarly caustic comments.* Sickert was amazed to notice that Whistler – the terror of the London drawing rooms – was somewhat in awe of Degas, and wary of his tongue. When Whistler gave an informal lecture one evening at the rue Sygogne on ‘The Secret of Art’ – a sort of scaled down version of the Ten o’Clock Lecture – Degas, though amused, was not unduly impressed.46 Sickert’s own status, too, was changing. He was now a married man, with an independently wealthy wife, whilst Whistler was still a not very prosperous bachelor. During the course of the holiday Sickert lent his master £5.47
The party broke up gradually towards the end of September. Degas returned to Paris ahead of the group, though he urged Sickert and Ellen to come and visit him there before they went back to London: ‘He said we must see a great deal of him in Paris at the beginning of next month,’ Ellen reported. ‘I do think he is perfectly delightful.’ And the sincerity of his invitation was reinforced by several kind messages.48 It was too good an opportunity to miss.
In October, Walter and Ellen were in Paris. They called on Degas and were warmly received; his only sadness was that Jane Cobden could not be there as well. (As Ellen remarked teasingly to her sister, ‘You might do worse, Janie dear!’49) He invited them to dine with him one evening, together with his ‘very best friends’, the artist Paul Bartholomé and his wife. There was also an opportunity to see his work.50 He showed them some of his recent pastels – studies of unselfconscious women washing and drying themselves. Painters, he remarked, were too apt to make ‘formal portraits’ of women rather than allowing ‘their hundred and one gestures, their chatteries’ to inspire an infinite variety of design. ‘Je veux,’ he remarked, ‘regarder par le trou de la serrure [I wish to look through the keyhole].’51 The images possessed a startling directness and truth far beyond the coy eroticism or idealized fantasy of conventional late nineteenth-century nudes. Degas wondered how they would be received if he sent them to the Royal Academy. Sickert suggested they would not be received at all. ‘Je m’en doutais,’ Degas replied. ‘Ils n’admettant pas le cynisme dans l’art.’52
The same sense of scrupulous detachment, if not cynicism, pervaded his pictures of popular performers: ballet dancers, circus acrobats, and café singers. He even described how he had employed the services of a professional draughtsman to help him with the perspective in his painting of the trapeze artist in La La at the Cirque Fernando.53 The world of the popular stage was one that Degas loved, and he communicated his enthusiasm to Sickert, discoursing upon his favourite performers and singing snatches of music-hall ditties.54 Treating Sickert as a fellow practitioner, he flattered him with a fusillade of technical tips: ‘On donne l’idée du vrai avec le faux’; ‘the art of painting [is] so to surround a patch of, say, Venetian red, that it appear[s] to be a patch of vermilion’.55 They were, for the most part, ideas that Sickert could barely as yet comprehend, but he seized on them excitedly as coming from a true master – and a master who was interested in his education.
Degas was impressed and pleased by the ardour of his visitors. He gave them introductions not only to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, but also to several private collectors who held good examples of his work. Amongst the Sickerts’ artistic pilgrimages was one to the apartment off the Champs Élysées of Gustave Mulbacher – a successful coachbuilder who owned an impressive monochrome painting of a ballet rehearsal.56 Ellen was captivated by the work; she thought Degas’ paintings ‘simply magnificent’, almost ‘the finest in the world’.57
For Sickert they were a source of revelation and inspiration. Away from the holiday atmosphere of Dieppe, his friendship with Degas achieved a new intensity on the common ground of art. Degas’ studio became henceforth ‘the lighthouse’ of Sickert’s existence, and his friendship one of the great facts of his artistic life. From that time onwards, whenever he was in Paris Sickert had – as he put it with scant exaggeration – ‘the privilege of seeing constantly, on terms of affectionate intimacy, this truly great man’.58
Walter and Ellen returned to London at the end of November lit up by the experience of being in Degas’ company and studying his work. Degas even followed up his many acts of kindness by sending Sickert ‘a beautiful letter’ that kept his presence alive in their minds.* As Ellen told Blanche, Degas’ pictures ‘haunt our imaginations’. She admitted that they would probably ‘end by giving up the dull necessities of life & buying one of his pictures’.59 For the moment, however, the dull necessities took precedence. The Sickerts had no home. The house they intended to lease, in a new development at Broadhurst Gardens, near Swiss Cottage, was not yet ready for them. As a result, they were obliged to take lodgings in Albany Street, close to Regent’s Park.60
* Annie Cobden’s husband, T. J. Sanderson, had amalgamated his name with that of his wife, to become T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. There seems to have been no suggestion that Sickert follow this course. Ellen, however, concerned to preserve the memory of her illustrious father, frequently – though not invariably – signed herself Mrs Cobden-Sickert.
* Sickert was beginning to appreciate the difficulties of working on a large scale directly from the motif. He had attempted to paint the Hôtel Royale on ‘a really large canvas’, setting up his easel on the hotel terrace. The size of the picture, however, had attracted the attention