It was a triumph of publicity – if nothing else. The furore focused attention on to the NEAC, and it placed Sickert at the very centre of the stage. The position was both new and exciting. He was acknowledged – albeit only in London art circles – as standing in the front rank of ‘the independent, and often eccentric’ young men ‘seeking to strike out a new line and throw off the trammels of tradition – and, some would add, of respect’.44 His attention-grabbing display at the Dudley Gallery was made more pointed the following month when the four modest landscapes that he exhibited at the RSBA failed to draw any but the most cursory critical attention.* It was to be his last association with the society for a decade. After surviving one vote of no-confidence, Whistler was finally ousted from the presidency at a packed general meeting on 4 June 1888. His followers resigned en masse. Sickert, who had never been a member, ceased to send pictures. As Whistler remarked, ‘the artists left and the British remained’.45 For Sickert, the debacle confirmed his good sense in establishing a base at the NEAC. As he wrote to Blanche soon afterwards, affecting a tone of cool assurance, ‘Do send us again some work – the more important the better – to the New English Art Club. That will be the place I think for the young school in England. Faute de mieux.’46
Inspired by the succès d’exécration of his Katie Lawrence picture, Sickert buried himself in his work that summer, spending many evenings drawing at Gatti’s and elsewhere.47 The music hall became his all-but exclusive theme. Copies of Entr’acte littered his studio; photographs of star performers were affixed to his easel.48 Ellen, with her keen admiration for Degas’ work, encouraged him in this direction. She would sometimes accompany him to the halls, and they would sup together afterwards at cheap and cheerful restaurants in Soho.49 But when Sickert became caught up by a subject his appetite for work was all-consuming. He forgot everything else.50 He would go out every night to study the aspects of his composition. He took to following his chosen artistes from hall to hall over the course of one evening so that he might have repeated opportunities of catching the fleeting details of some gesture or expression. It was a regime that inevitably drew him away from Ellen and the life of Broadhurst Gardens. He would return home in the early hours of the morning – after walking halfway across London – to find a sleeping house.51 He was not good at informing Ellen of his plans – indeed he was not good at making plans. He expected meals to be ready for him on the chance of his appearance, but the chance was often missed. Sometimes he would fail to turn up even when he and Ellen had guests to dinner, sending a last-minute telegram from a distant music hall to explain his absence.52
He became friendly with the artistes whom he depicted: with the forthright Katie Lawrence and her unrelated namesake, Queenie; with Bessie Bellwood, the raucous, bright-eyed ‘coster genius’ who delighted the gallery with her sharp treatment of hecklers.53 Sometimes he would escort them on their cab rides as they dashed across London from one hall to the next, and at the end of an evening he might go back to their lodgings for an impromptu supper of tripe and onions.54 He came to love their world and their wit, the freedom of their unabashed engagement with life and language. He relished their sayings: Bessie Bellwood closing an argument with an irate cab driver with the remark, ‘Do you think I’m going to stand here to be insulted by a low-down, slab-sided cabman? I’m a public woman, I am!’; Katie Lawrence observing, as their cab horse began to prance, ‘Oh! A song and dance horse?’; or her succinct comment when – traversing a building site – she stubbed her toe on a brick, ‘Bugger the bricks!’ (to which a workman, who was walking behind her, replied, ‘Quite right, ma’m, quite right. Bugger the bricks!’).55
They, for their part, were flattered by the attention of their young admirer. Not that he was a lone presence. Indeed Bessie Bellwood was the acknowledged mistress of the Duke of Manchester, who installed her in a house in Gower Street (causing, it must be supposed, some consternation amongst the high-minded denizens of that thoroughfare) and who could sometimes be seen driving her about in his brougham.56 Sickert’s position as a painter counted for something – though art was not held in very high esteem by these theatrical performers. At one of Bessie Bellwood’s late-night ‘At Homes’ she produced an old oil painting, black with grime, that she had picked up at a junk shop. Sickert called for a bowl of hot water and a sponge and began cleaning off the dirt very gently. Bessie soon lost patience, grabbed the sponge from him, and started scrubbing away with a will, to reveal an image of St Lawrence on the griddle. When the next caller was announced she said that she couldn’t see him as she was ‘giving Lawrence a Turkish’.57 Sickert’s own work was treated even more rudely by his models. When he asked Katie Lawrence if she would care to have one of the several life-sized portraits he had done of her, she replied, ‘No, not even to keep the wind out at the scullery door.’58 It was for his looks, his humour, and his engaging character, that they liked him.
As they advanced, Sickert’s music-hall pictures grew avidly complex. He experimented with new and more intricate compositions; he viewed the stage from odd angles; and he played with the subtle shifts in tone and perspective effected by the smoky gilt-framed mirrors that lined the walls of his auditoria. Sickert’s fascination with reflected images and reflected light may have owed something to his glimpse of The Bar of the Folies Bergère at Manet’s studio, and perhaps more to Degas’ great interest in the whole subject.59 But it was a theme that he took up as his own, and in exploring its possibilities his art took a stride forward in both its ambition and achievement. He became, by degrees, a master of low tones and their relations to rival even Whistler. Indeed some contemporaries came to believe that Sickert’s specific claim to ‘genius’ lay in this ‘extraordinarily sure sense of tone’.60 Like Claude Lorrain he had, it seems, the ability to distinguish and order a greater range of light and darkness in a scene than other artists. In part, this was probably a natural gift – like the acute visual perception that allowed his grandfather to carry out his phenomenally accurate micrometer readings. But he honed his skill, and displayed his rare powers of concentration, amongst the flaring lights and dim reflections of the Old Bedford, Gatti’s,