* The praise seems to have been well merited. Oswald Adalbert devoted that summer to working in pastel. Some of the pictures he produced – according to his daughter’s estimate – ‘showed a remarkable revival of interest in a man of fifty-seven’. Blanche, too, remembered them as ‘ravissant’ (HMS, 130; JEB, MS ‘Walter Sickert’).
† ‘The role of the butterfly must be pretty tiring. Me, I prefer to be the old ox.’
* ‘My dear Whistler, you behave like a man without talent,’ Degas declared of one of Whistler’s bouts of affectation. On the question of Whistler’s love of public controversy he remarked: ‘I find it quite possible to pass an arena’.
* The real affection between Degas and the Sickerts was confirmed early in the New Year when, to oblige Walter, Degas – who was attending to family business in Naples – called on the Richmond family at nearby Posilippo. Dorothy Richmond he had, of course, met at Dieppe in the summer, when the ‘jeune Australienne’, as he called her, had figured in some of the comic tableaux photographed by Walter Barnes.
Always remember the golden rule – in art nothing matters
so long as you are bold.
(Whistler, quoted by Mortimer Menpes)
Sickert had hurried back to London in time for the opening of the Society of British Artists’ 1885 winter exhibition. Whistler’s increasing influence within the society, and the presence of the sympathetic young painter Jacomb Hood on the hanging committee, had secured a good showing for Sickert’s work and he had three small coastal scenes on display. Other members of the Whistlerian ‘school’ were also well represented.1 Menpes, as a member, was of course able to show by right. He had been joined within the ranks of the club by William Stott though another Whistlerian nominee, Harper Pennington, was not successful.2 Although the records of the SBA are not complete there is no evidence to suggest that Sickert was put forward for membership at this time – or later. Both he and Menpes appeared in the catalogue with the epithet ‘pupil of Whistler’ appended after their names.3 Such a designation was common currency in French exhibition catalogues, but the description, if not inappropriate, had the air of an attempt to a fix a position that was already shifting.
The Whistlerian group within the SBA may have been relatively small, but its impact was apparent. As Sickert wrote to Blanche (who also had a picture on view), ‘Suffolk Street has this advantage, that forward work may be seen there on an ample background of the most backward there is.’4 More, young ‘forward’-thinking artists began to be drawn to the club. Sickert met several new Whistlerian enthusiasts, amongst them Théodore Roussel, ‘a very pleasant fellow’ whom Whistler had recently taken up.5 A Frenchman by birth, Roussel had become a ‘cockney by adoption’, settling in London in the mid 1870s, when he was almost thirty. His twin passions were for Chelsea and Whistler. He took to depicting the former in the style of the latter – painting nocturnes of the Chelsea embankment and making etchings of the shopfronts in Church Street.6 He was, Sickert told Blanche, ‘the most thorough going & orthodox Whistlerite I have ever met’, and as such was a welcome addition to ‘the Butterfly propaganda’.7 Trailing doggedly in Roussel’s wake was his hunchbacked apprentice – and ‘mildly “damned soul” in low-toned riverside views’ – Paul Maitland.8
Less slavishly indebted to the Master, but none the less admiring, was Philip Wilson Steer. An almost exact contemporary of Sickert’s, Steer had only quite recently returned from two years’ study in Paris at the thoroughly traditional École des Beaux-Arts. Although he had seen some Impressionist work during his French sojourn, it was Whistler who most impressed him. When he returned to London at the end of 1884, he took a studio in Chelsea and began experimenting in a Whistlerian vein.9 He also tried out several other artistic styles. The painting he sent to the SBA exhibition that winter – a small Arcadian panel of a female goatherd – owed rather more to Bastien-Lepage than to anyone else. It certainly had a French title – Le Soir – which may have almost been enough on its own to persuade Sickert to seek out its author.10
Sickert discovered an ally, a friend, and a foil. Even at twenty-five, Steer’s handsome, slightly bovine features proclaimed a staid and comfort-loving temperament. Forward looking and Francophile in his painting, in almost all other matters he was innately conservative and English. He disliked change almost as much as he disliked draughts. His pleasures were many if simple: tea, toast, cats, Chelsea Pottery figurines (‘the best bad taste’), and mild flirtations with young models. And he had enough private income to be able to indulge them. Placid, self-effacing, and instinctive, he was in many respects an opposite to the energetic, communicative, and intellectualizing Sickert. But opposites attract, and they formed an instant bond. It helped, too, that they made each other laugh.
Sickert’s excitement at these new contacts and opportunities was abruptly curtailed at the beginning of December when his father fell ill – after taking a chill while out sketching – and then ‘rather suddenly’ died.11 It was a ‘great grief’, and an unexpected one.12 Oswald Adalbert Sickert was only fifty-seven. Although by all the conventional standards he had failed to establish himself as an artist, Walter admired him greatly, both for his work and his judgement. ‘I have never’, he later claimed, ‘forgotten anything he said to me.’13 The great sadness was that he had not said more. Walter came to regret all the subjects – especially those relating to painting – they had never had a chance to discuss.14 Sickert already had a sense that he stood in the third generation of a line of painters. His father’s death sharpened that perception, and placed a new onus of responsibility upon him. He preserved amongst his most treasured possessions examples of his father’s – and his grandfather’s – work, and drew strength from their suggestions of a shared and continuous artistic tradition.15
Sickert’s immediate duty was to his mother, who was all but inconsolable and little able to attend to the demands of the moment. He moved back to Pembroke Gardens with Ellen in order to help with the funeral and other arrangements.*16 Ellen got on well with her mother-in-law, but even she struggled to draw Mrs Sickert from the depths of her grief. That feat was eventually accomplished by the unlikely figure of Oscar Wilde. He insisted upon seeing Mrs Sickert and gently coaxed her into talking of her husband and her loss. As Helena recalled, ‘He stayed a long while, and before he went I heard my mother laughing.’