Walter Sickert: A Life. Matthew Sturgis

Sickert’s approach seems to have been directed closely by Whistler’s example. Menpes recalled receiving a telegraphed summons to Broadhurst Gardens portending an important discovery. He and Sickert had noted Whistler’s recently adopted ‘system’ of painting with ready-mixed and ready-diluted colours such as ‘floor tone’, ‘flesh tone’, and ‘blue sky tone’, which he kept always on hand. Sickert had at once seized upon the idea – and carried it further. Menpes, as he made his way up to the attic studio, could hear an ominous ‘dripping sound’. He found Sickert working from a model, surrounded by ‘about fifty milk cans’, each filled with a different tone: ‘lip tone, eye tone etc.’. The paint was so liquid that, as he tried to get it from the pot on to the canvas, it dripped all over the floor. And the operation had to be undertaken at such speed that it could hardly be accurate: most of the eye tone ‘went on to the background’. ‘I felt that the eye should be in the face,’ Menpes remembered, ‘but still it was an eye, and it was art, and in art – according to the Whistlerites’ dictum – nothing mattered as long as you were reckless and had your tones.’³⁹

It was at about this time that the small but growing inner circle of Whistler ‘followers’ formalized themselves into a club. They decided to hire a room where they might meet of an evening ‘for the discussion of art’. Gathered at Menpes’ house in Fulham one evening, the seven members consulted a map of London, marking their homes on it with red dots, and then estimating the most convenient central location for their meeting place. Baker Street was fixed upon and a little room was taken there for six shillings a week. Beyond Menpes and Sickert the exact membership of the group is unknown, but the original line-up almost certainly included Sidney Starr, Harper Pennington, and Alberto Ludovici Jr. Théodore Roussel was an early addition.⁴⁰ Other possible members were Bernhard Sickert, William Stott, Jacomb Hood, and Philip Wilson Steer. The claims of such female followers as Maud Franklin and Elizabeth Armstrong seem to have been ignored.^* Adopting what they considered to be a Whistlerian maxim – ‘Nature never makes a mistake in matching her tones’ – the group decorated their room as a ‘harmony’ of sea and sky with sky-blue distemper walls and a sea-green distemper ceiling, whilst the woodwork was painted ‘the tone of the Dover cliffs’. Although the scheme was, from a naturalistic point of view, upside down, it was, of course, another Whistlerian axiom that nature was just as beautiful either way up. Headed notepaper was ordered, stamped with a symbolic motif – ‘a steam engine advancing, with a red-light displayed, – a warning signal to the Philistines that the reformers were on their track’.⁴¹

In their earnest discussions around the inadequate paraffin stove, in their quest for that ‘great discovery in the matter of method, or of pigment, or of manipulation’ that would ‘revolutionise all the old canons of art’, Whistler remained their guiding light. Théodore Roussel brought a touch of scientific rigour to their deliberations. Of a technical bent, he had designed what he called (in his heavily accented English) a ‘tone detector-r-r’ – an optical device for matching the tones of nature. He also worked out a scheme for mixing perfectly pure pigments from ground-up crystals.⁴² But, for all the reverence accorded to Whistler, the parallel attractions of Degas were not to be ignored. Sickert, on his return from Paris, enthused his confrères with descriptions of the work he had seen there. As he told Blanche, he only wished he could ‘bring the whole school over to Paris to make the Mulbacher and other pilgrimages’ – that they might examine Degas’ pictures at first hand.⁴³ Although the followers did not advertise to Whistler this new interest in Degas – or ‘Digars’, as Menpes referred to him – they considered the two artists as twin spirits, Impressionists both.^* They tried to combine the method of one with the subject matter of the other, producing not entirely satisfactory pictures of ‘low toned’ ballet girls.⁴⁴

      Another alternative voice was provided by Charles Keene. Sickert had come to know him well. He visited him at his studio in the King’s Road, and invited him to Broadhurst Gardens.⁴⁵ They dined together at the Arts Club in Dover Street (it was Keene who put Sickert up for membership there in 1888),⁴⁶ and they talked of art. Keene impressed Sickert on many levels: in his practical attitude to his craft; in his patient humility (‘Think of that great man drawing all those bricks,’ Sickert remarked of Keene’s depiction of a garden wall); in his artistic engagement with the world around him.⁴⁷ There were useful tips to be gleaned. Sickert observed how Keene worked always on a relatively small scale.⁴⁸ He relished his diatribe against the use of nude models in art schools on the ground that ‘the world being filled with clothed persons, modern painters will have more need to learn how to paint them than to paint nudes’.⁴⁹ He noted, too, how Keene used himself as his own clothed model, keeping a variety of costumes hanging on pegs in his studio for the purpose.⁵⁰

      In most things Keene offered a rather different perspective to Whistler. There was no pretension about him or his art: he had achieved his greatness ‘doing drawings for a threepenny comic paper to make his living’ – and that was what he went on doing.⁵¹ His view of Whistler, though generally admiring, was not overburdened with reverence. He surprised Sickert, and set him thinking, by a preference for Whistler’s paintings over his etchings.⁵² After revealing an heretical admiration for the work of the Berlin realist Adolph Menzel, he confided ‘with one of his monumental and comprehensive winks, “Ye know, I like bad pictures. But don’t tell Jimmy.”’⁵³

      Though Keene, like Degas, might offer the first hint of an alternative vision, for the time being it remained only a hint. Sickert had little difficulty in reconciling all attractive ideas with those of Whistler. The essential commitment to Whistler’s cause and Whistler’s interests remained constant. He did a drawing of a Whistler painting for reproduction in the Pall Mall Budget, and fired off a letter to the Daily News after it had had the temerity to suggest that England lacked a painter who could depict English snow.⁵⁴ He even undertook to sort out a dispute that had arisen between Whistler and the Fine Art Society over a missing pair of Venice etchings.⁵⁵ His attendance at Whistler’s studio may have slackened, but it did not cease. Beatrice Godwin, who had recently separated from her husband, was sitting to Whistler (who greatly admired her), and Sickert made an etching of her in the same pose.⁵⁶ He also sat for his own portrait.⁵⁷

      Whistler’s power base within the Society of British Artists continued to expand. He was active in putting forward his supporters for membership – Starr was elected in the spring of 1886 – but Sickert, as a non-member, remained vulnerable to the vagaries of the picture selection process. The conservative element within the SBA was still formidable and, as Sickert explained to Blanche, while the Whistlerites had been lucky to have Jacomb Hood on the hanging committee, ‘next time it may be three idiots’.⁵⁸ And perhaps that was how it turned out. Sickert was not represented in the society’s April exhibition. The rebuff would have been felt the more keenly because Starr’s painting – of Paddington station – was the hit of the show.⁵⁹