Walter Sickert: A Life. Matthew Sturgis

immigrant, or a common vagrant, a released lunatic, a rogue slaughterman, a deranged butcher, a jealous prostitute, a mad doctor, or a neurotic medical student. There was even the suggestion that the killings could be the work of a giant eagle.⁸⁶ Theories were many, reliable leads few. The police, despite making numerous arrests, seemed no nearer to charging anyone. On 3 October they took the step of publishing two anonymous letters they had received from someone claiming to be the murderer. The first was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. The publication did little to advance the police investigation (it is now generally supposed that the letters were the work of a crank or a journalist), but it did provide the killer with a name – one that was at once taken up, and has never been put down since. Sickert appreciated the drama of the moment. He loved mysteries, and he knew the East End from his days acting at the Shoreditch Theatre and his more recent visits to the outlying music halls at Poplar, Canning Town, and the Mile End Road.⁸⁷ The general state of panic did nothing to curb his own nocturnal rambling. Almost as soon as he returned to London he resumed his evening studies in the stalls at Collins’s Music Hall on Islington Green.⁸⁸ He was probably more amused than alarmed when, walking home late one evening through King’s Cross, he passed a group of girls who fled from him shouting ‘Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper’. It was the only time during his life that anyone suggested that he was the killer.^*

      There was one more murder, that of Mary Kelly on 9 November. After that, the terror gradually subsided but, as no one was ever caught, the mystery endured. It was supposed that the killer had fled the country or committed suicide. Sickert, however, had other things to concern him. Blanche came over to London briefly for the opening of the Pastel Exhibition at the Grosvenor. He was grateful to Sickert for effecting the entrée and, in what was becoming a regular ritual of exchanges, presented his friend with a picture. The meeting gave them a chance to lay plans. Sickert hoped that Blanche might persuade his friend Helleu to become a member of the NEAC. Such an ‘incontestable mâitre’ would be a useful addition to the ranks.⁸⁹ Sickert also advised Blanche to send something to the RSBA winter show, if only ‘to keep the pot boiling’, and, forgetting the complications that must ensue, even suggested that he might submit something boring himself.⁹⁰ In the event, he recalled his duty to Whistler and felt it wisest not to offend his former master by sending to Suffolk Street. Instead he exhibited one of his small panel pictures – a view of the ‘bains du Casino’ at Dieppe – at the less contentious Institute of Painters in Oil Colours.⁹¹ It was a useful means of keeping his name, and his work, before the public.

^* Whistler exhibited his painting of Ellen. Mrs Sickert thought it ‘not a scrap like her but … a fine picture and interesting’ (to Mrs Muller, 1887). The canvas was subsequently destroyed.

^* Two of the pictures were, however, admired by the representatives of Liverpool’s annual Art Exhibition, and were selected for inclusion in their show at the Walker Art Gallery that autumn.

^* Rose Pettigrew, a young model (sometimes used by Whistler, and etched by Sickert in 1884), recalled Beatrice advising her against having an affair with Steer, who was in love with her, on the grounds ‘that Sickert was much more clever than Steer [as] time would tell’ (Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 119).

† Sickert had sent a little ‘still life’ pastel to Les XX in 1887, but it had not attracted a great deal of attention. In a letter to Blanche, however, he does mention a dinner at the Hogarth Club in the autumn of 1888 at which Sir Coutts Lindsay, owner of the Grosvenor Gallery, asked him with ‘une naïveté et une politesse exquise’ if he had ever tried pastel – ‘!’. The level and direction of Sickert’s irony, as indicated by his exclamation mark, is difficult to gauge. Had Sickert submitted a pastel that had been rejected? Had he enjoyed an acclaimed success with a pastel elsewhere? Or had he simply not tried pastel seriously yet?

^* See Postscript.

       III THE LONDON IMPRESSIONISTS

      You have given us a great lift.

       (Walter Sickert to D. C. Thomson)

      The band of ‘Followers’ that had once gathered around Whistler, or sat about the paraffin stove in Baker Street, was rapidly losing its cohesion. Menpes, already ostracized by Whistler on account of an unsanctioned sketching trip to Japan (an artistic world that had been mapped and colonized but never actually visited by the Master), became a focus for active attack when, towards the end of 1888, a series of highly complimentary articles on him and his work appeared in the press.¹ Whistler was furious, and sought to enlist Sickert’s aid in countering such unmerited publicity.² Sickert counselled restraint. He wrote to Beatrice, knowing the beneficial influence she exerted over her excitable husband: ‘Tell Jimmy not on any account to be drawn by Menpes’ rot. It is the one object he would like to achieve … He must be let severely alone. Tell Jimmy he mustn’t say good things about him because that is advertisement.’³ Whistler was never likely to take such good advice. He responded with a salvo of vituperative – even vicious – squibs in the pages of The World that damned Menpes as a talentless plagiarist. Sickert’s own friendship with Menpes did not survive this campaign of abuse. The ferocity of Whistler’s feelings would have made it difficult for anyone to remain friends with both men. Moreover, Sickert’s relationship with Menpes had always been largely fortuitous: it was fostered by their common bond with Whistler, and once that bond was broken there was little else to keep them together. Menpes, probably to Sickert’s relief, did not join the NEAC, or send any more pictures there. Another casualty from the group was William Stott of Oldham, who had been looking after Maud Franklin since the break-up of her relationship with Whistler. Incensed by what he considered to be Whistler’s shoddy treatment of his one-time mistress, he had publicly insulted his erstwhile hero one evening at the Hogarth Club, and then got into an unseemly scuffle with him.⁴ Elizabeth Armstrong also drifted out of the circle. On a sketching trip down to St Ives she had met and become engaged to the plein-air painter Stanhope Forbes, who, although still a member of the NEAC, was in stark opposition to Sickert’s faction. He disapproved of Whistler and Sickert, and urged his fiancée to disassociate herself from such bad – if amusing – influences.⁵

      Sickert, with touching solicitude, constantly sought to reassure Whistler of his own enduring loyalty and support, but the main focus of his energies – and the balance of his allegiances – had subtly shifted. He was now an ‘Impressionist’ rather than merely a ‘Whistlerite’. His thoughts were concentrated on the New English Art Club; and, despite repeated solicitations, Whistler still stood out from the group.⁶ It had been supposed by several commentators that, once ousted from Suffolk Street, Whistler would find a refuge at the NEAC; but, though he continued to allow his work to be exhibited, he declined to become a member of the new body.⁷ It was said that the former President of the RSBA disdained to join a club that was