Time spent with Degas – visiting galleries, looking at pictures, talking of art – deepened Sickert’s awe and admiration. The exceptional cohesion, or ‘purity’ as Sickert described it, of Degas’ life made a great impression. Instead of deploying his will, his talent, and his wit to make himself ‘notorious’ – as, to some extent, Whistler had done – he remained always true to his art.44 As Sickert remarked to Blanche, shortly after returning to London, ‘I find more & more, in half a sentence that Degas has said, guidance for years of work.’45
Sickert’s main undertaking during the latter half of 1889 was to arrange an exhibition by the core members of the NEAC’s Impressionist clique.46 David Croal Thomson, the young – and, as Sickert asserted, ‘fearless’ – manager of the progressive Goupil Gallery in New Bond Street, had offered them the use of his space in December. Although it was a group venture, necessitating the usual round of discussions and excited studio meetings, Sickert was, as ever, the presiding spirit and the acknowledged spokesman.47 He helped define the limits of the group: Fred Brown, Francis Bate, Wilson Steer, Sidney Starr, Francis James, and Théodore Roussel were, of course, included; but it was probably Sickert’s influence that secured the inclusion of his brother Bernhard and George Thomson, and his indulgence that admitted Paul Maitland.48
They chose to exhibit under the name of the ‘London Impressionists’. The title was obvious enough, perhaps even inevitable; if they had not adopted it themselves they might well have been given it by others.49 Sickert, however, continuing the theme of his newspaper articles, worked hard to extend, if not to explode, critical preconceptions. While always admitting the eminence of Whistler and Degas, he insisted upon other perspectives and influences. When quizzed by one interviewer about what an ‘Impressionist’ was, Sickert – after some evasion – replied, ‘A definition is a terrible thing, but the meaning that we should attach to the word, if it is to stand in any way as a declaration of faith on our part, must be a very catholic one. The main article of the creed would perhaps be study and reverence for the best traditions of all time. Velasquez was an Impressionist, and Leech was an Impressionist, and Holbein was an Impressionist.’50
Sickert planned to exhibit three complex new music-hall paintings as well as a couple of less contentious pieces. Racing to finish his pictures for the show, he drove himself into a frenzy of activity. When Blanche came over to London in the autumn he found Sickert ‘up to [his] ears in work’. Dinner was out of the question: ‘I am tied up for the week in a picture of an obscure Music Hall in a northern suburb which necessitates my going without dinner to be in my eighteenpenny stall on the stroke of eight.’51 And for most of the day he was ‘full of appointments with models and serio-comics’. He could meet his friend only for a hurried lunch ‘at one o’clock (exactly)’.
As well as sketching from the ‘eighteenpenny stalls’ and having sittings from ‘serio-comics’, Sickert deployed other elements in building up his pictures. He spent time that winter working at Heatherley’s, the old-established teaching studio in Newman Street. Although he seems, in part, to have used the school merely as a convenient central London workspace, it did offer him a chance to experiment with effects of light, or semi-darkness. One young student retained ‘lively recollections’ of his visits to the ‘dingy old academy’: ‘It was a winter of much fog and consequent gaslight, and Sickert, with his then preoccupation with “atmospherics,” was in his element.’ He rarely ‘painted from the models’, but made ‘impressionist studies of figures or groups of students seen through the murk’.*52
It was hoped that George Moore might write a preface to the exhibition catalogue, but at the last moment the arrangement fell through.53 Sickert dashed off a piece in his stead, commencing with a feisty attack on William Morris and the so-called decorative painting of the Pre-Raphaelite school – characterized by its ‘absence of convincing light and shade, of modelling, of aerial perspective, of sound drawing, of animation, of expression’. He insisted that what really mattered in painting was ‘that subtle attribute which painters call quality’; he dragged in the familiar names, and he ended with his most considered – and personal – definition of ‘Impressionism’:
Essentially and firstly, it is not realism. It has no wish to record any thing merely because it exists. It is not occupied in a struggle to make intensely real and solid the sordid or superficial details of the subjects it selects. It accepts, as the aim of the picture, what Edgar Allan Poe asserts to be the sole legitimate province of the poem, beauty. In its search through visible nature for the elements for this same beauty, it does not admit the narrow interpretation of the word ‘Nature’ which would stop short outside the four-mile radius [enclosing metropolitan London]. It is, on the contrary, strong in the belief that for those who live in the most wonderful and complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and the poetry which they daily see around them, by means which they believe are offered to the student in all their perfection, not so much on the canvases that yearly line our official and unofficial shows of competitive painting, as on the walls of the National Gallery.54
The exhibition opened on 30 November 1889 to considerable critical and public interest. It achieved an almost immediate notoriety. Some fifty reviews were published, and by the end of the week the gallery was not merely crowded but ‘absolutely blocked’.55 There were sixty-nine pictures on view, of which Sickert had contributed just four.* What the crowds made of it is uncertain. Of the critics, Moore, Baldry, the Pennells, and Frederick Wedmore rallied, of course, to the standard and lavished a great deal of generous praise on Sickert’s music-hall pictures.56 But other voices prevailed. The vast majority of reviewers were either hostile or nonplussed. They complained of the paint-work and despaired at ‘the sheer unmitigated ugliness’ of the predominantly urban subject matter.