It was an outcome that Sickert had sought to avoid. But if it undermined the group’s aspirations towards originality it did not vitiate the impact of the show, or its influence. In the New Year, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts’ annual exhibition devoted a special section to the work of the ‘London Impressionists’, along with what one critic described as ‘the contributions of certain Scottish painters … whose aims are fresh enough – may one say eccentric enough? – to bear comparison with these’.60 Sickert felt able to commend Thomson for striking ‘the timeliest and most effective blow’ yet in favour of the Impressionist cause.61
* One day Sickert was disturbed at his easel by Moore bursting in and declaring: ‘I have been reading a life of Michael Angelo, and it seems that the David was carved out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried. I could no more have carved the David out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried than I could have flown!’ (RE, 97) He also called upon Sickert for help with the great question of how to keep his trousers up. When Sickert patiently explained to him the proper use of braces, he was dumbfound at the revelation. And on another occasion he dragged Sickert and Steer from their studios to take them on an excursion to Peckham Rye, because he had determined that the heroine of the story he was working on should come from there – and he had never visited the place (ML, 26).
* Sickert also cherished hopes of George Bernard Shaw, who was then acting as art critic for the newly established Liberal evening-paper The Star. He recognized him as ‘a critic who knows an artistic hawk from the hernshaw of commerce’. Shaw’s tenure of the post, however, was brief, and his independence of spirit not readily susceptible to direction. Sickert soon dubbed him ‘George Bernard Cock-sure’ (WS to Lady Eden).
* Steer, Bate, Brown, and Roussel were all on the selection committee. Whistler, too, had been elected to it, though it is not known whether he served (Comus, 1 January 1889).
* Lord Halsbury was one of very few criminal lawyers to become Lord Chancellor. As Hardinge Giffard, QC – before his ennoblement – he had been a leading counsel in the Tichborne case, a fact that would surely have interested Sickert, and perhaps even accounts for their connection.
* The American novelist Gertrude Atherton recalled meeting them there in the late 1880s, when Whistler ‘monopolized the conversation at table’ with brilliantly witty denunciations of all the other leading artists of the day: Burne-Jones, Millais, Leighton, Watts, and Alma-Tadema.
† ‘She is returning to Watteau’s cellar.’
* Sickert retained fond memories of Heatherley’s. When he came to fill in his Who’s Who entry in 1897, for the inaugural 1898 edition, in a deliberate snub to both the Slade and to Whistler he listed it as the sole seat of his ‘education’.
* Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall, The Oxford Music Hall, The PS Wings in the OP Mirror, and Twilight [‘The Butcher’s Shop’]; a fifth picture, Trefolium, though listed in the catalogue, was not mentioned by any of the critics and seems not to have been hung.
Mr Walter Sickert, if not agreeable, is striking.
(Frederick Wedmore, in The Academy)
Even at the moment of establishing himself as the prophet of a new movement – as the leader of the London Impressionists and painter-inordinary to the modern music hall – Sickert was beginning to look in new directions, and towards different subjects. There was, more than likely, an economic imperative behind this shift. Aged thirty, and after six years of regular exhibiting as well as considerable publicity, Sickert was still struggling. His art earnings remained minimal.1 His complex music-hall compositions were time consuming to produce, while their radical subject matter made them all but impossible to sell. For Ellen, the expense of funding both Sickert and Broadhurst Gardens was beginning to tell. Change became necessary on all fronts. It was decided to let the Hampstead house. With Ellen often ill and in need of sea air, and Sickert drawn increasingly back to Chelsea where Steer and most of the other London Impressionists lived, 54 Broadhurst Gardens had come to seem overlarge and underused. A tenant was soon found, and as an immediate step Ellen and Sickert moved back to the Sickert family home at Pembroke Gardens.2 Although the removal from Hampstead may have been conceived as a temporary measure, they would never return. Indeed they would never live together again under a roof that was unequivocally their own.
In tandem with this relocation Sickert sought new, potentially more remunerative, avenues for his work. He surprised his old mentor Otto Scholderer by claiming that he wished he had concentrated on ‘still-life’.3 Since his early essays in flower painting he had attempted nothing in that line. And he did not return to it now. Instead he embarked upon portraiture.
It was the established wisdom of the studios that portrait commissions offered artists the surest – and richest – rewards. Whistler had supported himself by them, and it was natural for his former pupil to consider the same course. The difficulty was to make a beginning. In order to advertise his new departure, and to practise his craft, Sickert, like many before him, had to start by painting himself and his friends. He painted Steer (and Steer, who was embarked on the same course, painted him). He also adopted other, less conventional ploys. Some of his studies for music-hall pictures began to shade into portraits. Artistes already came to pose on the stage at Broadhurst Gardens; now they sat more formally. Sickert made a full-length portrait of Queenie Lawrence in evening dress – seen in the Whistlerian fashion, glancing backwards over her shoulder against a dark background. He titled it with her real name: Miss Fancourt.4
If Sickert’s own interests inclined him to look to the stage as a source of portrait work, the Cobden connection suggested the altogether more promising world of politics. Through Ellen, Sickert had been introduced to many of the leading figures of the old Cobdenite establishment: prosperous men who might want to be immortalized in paint. Sickert had already made a start in this direction. When Herbert Vivian had visited his studio in the autumn of 1889 he had noted a pass for the ‘Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery’ at the House of Commons and some sketches of at least one ‘well-known statesman’.