Walter, for all his real filial affection, was careful to preserve a measure of independence and distance. As the eldest male – and the most powerful personality – he assumed a position of some command. One of his first acts was to persuade his mother that the feckless Bernhard was ‘a painter and nothing but a painter’ and should be spared the trials of conventional employment.19 He had had a picture accepted that winter at the SBA, and Sickert had drawn him into the circle of Whistlerites. He remained, however, very much a younger brother: it was understood that he should sign his works in full, while Walter could use their surname unadorned, on the grounds – as Walter explained to him – that ‘if we had been girls, I should have been Miss Sickert [as the eldest], but you would have been Miss Bernhard Sickert’.20
Walter and Ellen finally moved into their new home at 54 Broad-hurst Gardens just before Christmas 1885; their first batch of headed writing paper had black mourning-borders. The house – part of a development of small-scale, four-storey, semi-detached dwellings – was in the fashionable aesthetic style, its red-brick façade broken by white-framed windows, its silhouette dominated by a steeply pointed gable end into which a balustraded picture window had been set. The developer had clearly been seeking to attract an artistic clientele for there was a ‘good studio’ at the top of the house, connected to the ground floor by a ‘speaking tube’.21 Sickert soon made himself at home in this ‘large, airy upper chamber’.22 He installed an etching bench and a small press, and gathered about him the paraphernalia of painting, as well as various studio ‘comforts’ given to him by his family: a rug, a footstool, a slop-pail, and a can. There was also ‘a comfortable settee’ upon which he could retire to think or read.23
The one misfortune of the move was that the new plasterwork had reacted strangely with the sky-blue distemper they had chosen for the walls of the three principal rooms – turning the colour to a ‘cold mauve’. The effect, Ellen noted, was ‘painful as the painted woodwork is the right blue-green’, and nothing could be done to correct it until the spring.24 Such was the horror of the colour combination that, even before they were properly settled, they were thinking of moving. There was talk of building a smaller house ‘quite to our satisfaction’ close by.25
Married life inevitably drew Sickert away from Whistler’s immediate ambit. Swiss Cottage was not close to Chelsea, and the business of furnishing a house was a time-consuming one.26 There were new interests, new connections, and new commitments to accommodate. Ellen had a wide circle of friends, and her sisters came to live close by.27 The whole world of the Cobdenites – old allies of Ellen’s father – was ready to welcome the happy couple and include Walter in the circle. He now found himself dining at political tables.28 He was a regular guest of Tom Potter, the fat and good-natured MP for Rochdale, whom Gladstone described as the ‘depository of Cobden’s traditions’,29 and he saw something of the ever more politically inclined William Morris at Kelmscott House. Having formed no particular political views of his own, Sickert was happy to adopt Ellen’s hereditary loyalties. He got on well with her father’s old cronies, though he enjoyed vexing William Morris’s handcraft sensibilities by wearing a ready-made tie in the worst possible taste whenever he and Ellen visited Hammersmith.30
Sickert seems to have been able to flourish in almost any company. Marriage to Ellen opened up new social opportunities for him; but he had already learnt society’s ways, and though he was attracted by its rewards he never succumbed to its ethos. He enjoyed flouting its conventions even as he embraced them.* His detachment remained secure. He learnt to play the man of the world, adding to the remarkable social confidence and charm he possessed, even as a boy, an almost princely courtesy. But, as one observer noted, in all his dealings with society there lurked beneath the surface an ‘undefinable and evasive mockery’.31 It was the mockery of the ‘artist’, but also the mockery of a second-generation bastard with a foreign name.
Despite all distractions, Whistler remained the central focus of Sickert’s life, and Ellen adopted it too. Indeed 54 Broadhurst Gardens, in its decor and style, was conceived as something of an hommage to the Master. Ellen even referred to it jokingly as ‘our Whistler House’.32 They owned Whistler’s picture A White Note; the green-and-white wardrobe painted by Whistler was installed; and almost the Sickerts’ first act after their marriage was to commission portraits of themselves from Whistler at 100 guineas apiece.† Sickert insisted on regarding this as a very favourable rate – ‘practically a fantastic present’.33 Ellen worked hard to win Whistler’s trust. She gained it – along with his gratitude – when she deployed her influence to prevent Harry Quilter – the hostile art critic of The Times and new owner of the White House – from receiving a testimonial from her friend John Morley.34 Whistler responded readily to such overtures.
It was certainly Whistler’s influence that secured Sickert a small one-man show at Dowdeswell’s Gallery during the dead season of January – a gathering of about twenty ‘little panels’, mostly of Dieppe.35 In the catalogue, Sickert was again captioned as the ‘pupil of Whistler’; the critics thought he still had lessons to absorb. ‘In what our [French] neighbours call facture,’ wrote the Illustrated London News’ reviewer,
Mr Sickert has certainly caught something of his master’s trick; but in the inner perception of the ‘things unseen’, which Mr Whistler led us often to feel were lurking behind his misty foregrounds, the pupil has still much to learn. If his aim has been to catch fleeting impressions and to transfer them at once to his canvases for subsequent use and study, there is no reason to find fault with the delicacy of his perception; but it is rather a misnomer to call such works pictures, or to attempt to pass them as the result of serious application. For the most part, the colouring is flat and opaque, and in nearly every case far too imitative of his master’s ‘symphonies’ and ‘arrangements’.*36
The confusion between the sketch and the painting was one of the standard criticisms of Impressionist art. Sickert would have expected it. But he does seem to have resolved – in the wake of the Dowdeswell show – to work on a slightly larger scale. For the future, he decided not to send ‘such small things’ to the Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy.37
A hint of promise was noted by the reviewer in the single-figure picture Olive; it was praised as showing ‘that Mr. Sickert, when left to think for himself, can produce satisfactory work, and contains the