Aside from exhibition plans Sickert’s delight in art-political intrigue found a fresh vent that spring in a concerted campaign against Hubert von Herkomer. Herkomer was a highly successful artist: founder of the flourishing Bushey School of Art, Slade Professor at Oxford, and – since the previous year – a Royal Academician. Seeking rather to overcapitalize on his name, he allowed some illustrations of his – published in a limited-edition poetry book – to be described as ‘etchings’, whereas they were in fact pen drawings mechanically reproduced by the relatively new process of photogravure. Sickert, as a printmaker, noted this economy with the truth, as did Joseph Pennell, and together they decided to stir up a controversy on the point. In this they were encouraged – even driven – by the deputy editor of the Scots Observer, Charles Whibley. He published letters from both Sickert and Pennell (as well as some from himself) pointing out Herkomer’s ploy and calling for his resignation from the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, if not from the Royal Academy as well.53 After some evasions, the distinguished RA was eventually goaded into admitting his error. Sickert and Pennell felt vindicated. They had won a victory for artistic and commercial probity: at a time of rapidly evolving print technologies, correct definitions had to be maintained. For both of them, though, it was a victory that would have – in due course – a bitterly ironic sequel.
The NEAC continued to advance under Sickert’s direction. The Humphreys Mansions experiment was not repeated and they returned to the Dudley Gallery, where it was planned they would henceforth hold two exhibitions during the course of the year – one in the spring and a second in the autumn. Sickert, as ever, was active on both the selecting and hanging committees. Some six hundred pictures were sent in; only a hundred were hung. He gave space to Blanche’s portraits of ‘Miss Pash’ and Olga Caracciolo, and to Steer’s second ‘audacious’ music-hall piece: Prima Ballerina Assoluta.54 After his own portraits of the previous year and the music-hall pictures of the year before that, Sickert showed a muted Dieppe townscape (a view of the Café des Tribunaux). The critics heaved a sigh of relief. While Steer’s picture drew most of the critical flak, Sickert’s ‘vigorous impression’ of the Dieppe streets was welcomed.55 One reviewer called it ‘graceful, accurate and harmonious … in a low but not dismal key’ – remarking that it ‘atones for more than one music hall by the same artist’.56 Another congratulated Sickert on keeping himself ‘free from any temptation to diverge into eccentricity’.57 The work was still recognized as being ‘Impressionist’, but its conventional subject matter made it less threatening.
At the beginning of May, Sickert – together with Steer and Starr – was invited to give a talk on ‘Impressionism in Art’ to a meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, a gathering (at least according to its secretary, Herbert Horne) of ‘all our most thoughtful artists’.58 William Blake Richmond was in the chair.59 Sickert’s speech has not been preserved, but it is likely that it reiterated the terms of his 1889 catalogue preface. Starr’s views are unknown, while Steer adopted the established ploy of claiming all ‘good artists, ancient and modern’ as fellow Impressionists.60 A slightly less familiar note was sounded by a fourth speaker. Besides the three London Impressionists, Horne had also secured the participation of Lucien Pissarro, the 28-year-old son – and pupil – of the celebrated Camille Pissarro. Lucien had recently arrived in England – so recently indeed that his command of the language was still shaky: he composed his paper in French and had it translated by Selwyn Image. He gave an historical account of the French Impressionist movement, taking it up to the ‘Neo-Impressionist’ – or pointillist – experiments of his father, Seurat, Signac, and others, stressing ‘le division du ton’ as the essential characteristic of this current Impressionist school.61
It was a narrow definition that set Sickert outside the movement – a fact that became clear to the young Pissarro when he was invited to lunch at Hereford Square. Although impressed by Sickert’s Degas pictures, he was less taken by Sickert’s own work. Writing to his father after a visit to Sickert’s Glebe Place studio, he confined himself to the single exclamation: ‘Déplorable!!’ Sickert, he considered, like most of his fellow ‘English Impressionists’, did not know a thing about Impressionism: he painted ‘à plat’ and with black on his palette.62 Although it is unlikely that Lucien Pissarro was as forthright in his comments to Sickert, the encounter was not propitious. No easy friendship sprang up between the two men. Amongst the group, only Steer struck Lucien as ‘a real artist’, in that he ‘divides the tones as we do’. Despite this point of agreement, and Steer’s generous praise for Camille Pissarro, Lucien was not ushered into the bosom of the New English Art Club. In part this may have been a result of his own shyness; but he was also concentrating his energies at the time, not on painting, but on printmaking and craft book-production, and was more interested in the possibilities of the proposed ‘Panel Society’, which, guided by the aesthetic Charles Ricketts, had a strong illustrative contingent.63
Lucien Pissarro made no mention of seeing Ellen when he lunched with Sickert, and it is quite possible that she was away, recuperating. She had ‘overreached herself’ again and fallen ill that spring.64 Nevertheless, along with Walter and most of the rest of the Sickert clan, she was back in Dieppe for at least part of the 1891 summer.65 Jane was also in the party. She was being courted by the publisher, T. Fisher Unwin.66 He was an imposing figure, tall, upright, with a beaked nose (slightly flattened at the tip) that curved out over a full beard. His air of dignity was such that it remained uncompromised even by his holiday attire of grey morning coat and straw boater.67 His pursuit of Jane Cobden was scarcely the awkward rapture of young love (she was forty that year, he was forty-three), but there seems to have been a rather touching bashfulness about proceedings. His own family only suspected romance was in the air on account of the care he began to lavish on his beard.68 To the crowd at Dieppe that summer matters seemed clearer. There was much speculation about if – or, rather, when – he would propose. An afternoon at the races seemed almost certain to culminate in a definite engagement. But the moment slipped by unused.69 Unwin instead made a rather less drastic proposal. He was interested in contemporary French art (he even bought a van Gogh painting along with several other works during the early nineties) and he was eager to canvas Sickert’s opinion.70 At Dieppe he asked Sickert to contribute an essay on ‘Modern Realism in Painting’ to a volume he was bringing out on the French realist painter, and father of the English plein-air tradition, Jules Bastien-Lepage. Amongst a selection of favourable essays, Sickert was to play devil’s advocate.
It was a welcome chance to set down some of his well-rehearsed ideas between hard covers. Sickert contrasted the practice of Bastien-Lepage – very unfavourably – with that of his slightly older contemporary, Millet. The contrast was a familiar one: while Bastien-Lepage had striven to paint photographically accurate scenes of rural life from nature, Millet had made his pictures in the studio, basing them on long observation, profound comprehension of the subject, and a few vestigial studies done on the spot – ‘a note sometimes of movement on a cigarette paper’.