To begin with, it was thought to be meritorious, and conducive to truth, and in every way manly and estimable, for the painter to take a large canvas out into the fields and to execute his final picture in hourly tête-à-tête with nature. This practice at once restricts the limits of your possible choice of subject. The sun moves too quickly. You find that grey weather is more possible, and end by never working in any other. Grouping with any approach to naturalness is found to be almost impossible. You find that you had better confine your compositions to a single figure. And with a little experience the photo-realist finds, if he be wise, that that single figure had better be in repose. Even then your picture necessarily becomes a portrait of a model posing by the hour. The illumination, instead of being that of a north light in Newman Street, is, it is true, the illumination of a Cornish or a Breton sky. Your subject is a real peasant in his own natural surroundings, and not a model from Hatton Garden. But what is he doing? He is posing for a picture as best he can, and he looks it. That woman stooping to put potatoes into a sack will never rise again. The potatoes, portraits every one, will never drop into the sack, and never a breath of air circulates around that painful rendering in the flat of the authentic patches on the very gown of a real peasant.72
The ‘truths’ gained by such a method amounted to no more than ‘a handful of tiresome little facts’. Millet’s approach offered – at least in the hands of a master like Millet (or Degas, or Whistler, or Keene) – the whole world of ‘life and spirit, light and air’.73 It also produced work that had style – ‘style which is at the same time in the best traditions and strictly personal’.74
Portraiture, as Sickert suggested, was a genre in which it was possible to paint directly from the subject. Studio conditions could be controlled, an unforced and maintainable pose could be chosen for the sitter – Sickert in his own early essays, following the example of Whistler, seems to have adopted just such a course. But he now began to explore other possibilities of approach. He returned from Dieppe to work on two portraits, one of George Moore, the other the Bradlaugh commission for Manchester. Each was different in style but both were painted away from the sitter.
The picture of Moore, which represented the critic, if not actually speaking, on the point of utterance, was made with the aid of only a couple of sittings. Moore recalled that Sickert, like Millet, proceeded by observing intensely and memorizing his impressions, and then working these up later in the studio.75 In the case of Bradlaugh, the artistic challenge was different: the sitter was dead. Although Sickert had his studies of the elderly politician made the previous year, it had been decided that the commemorative portrait should show Bradlaugh at one of the great historical junctures of his life – speaking from the bar of the House of Commons.76
No contemporary photographic record of the incident existed, so Sickert had to assemble the information piece by piece. He was already familiar with the interior of the House of Commons and he was able to borrow the actual suit that Bradlaugh had worn on that occasion for a model to pose in. The likeness itself he painted from a contemporary photograph.77 It was his first engagement with the medium.
The use of photography in painting was a contentious and much debated subject. The Royal Academy, and most other societies, specifically barred works that had been painted from photographs – although it was sometimes hard to spot them. Throughout his early critical writings Sickert had consistently attacked the use of photographs by artists. His attitude was fixed in part by the fact that he saw the practice as a corruption of the already corrupt school of plein-air realism. If the early followers of Bastien-Lepage aimed at creating a pseudo-photographic exactitude in their paintings, numerous tyros were seeking to short-circuit the process by painting directly from photographs.78
Sickert’s comments on the point were sometimes given an edge of personal spite. He lost no opportunity to denounce the unacknowledged – and unrecognized – use of photography in Mortimer Menpes’ facile topographic sketches. He contrasted ‘drawing [that] is the result of special gifts of brain and eye’ and that had been ‘arduously and painfully cultivated’ with work that has been done for the artist ‘by a machine’.79 From the tenor of his language it seems clear that, at this date, Sickert was still unaware of Degas’ – albeit much more subtle – use of photographic sources.
He did, however, temper his criticisms when it came to portraiture, admitting that the camera might be a useful tool. In his review of the 1890 Royal Academy summer show he had praised ‘Mr Van Beers’ supremely skilful copy in oils of an admirable instantaneous photograph of M. Henri Rochefort’. There was an element of mischief in this, as Van Beers had not admitted his debt, and Sickert was showing off his own inside knowledge. He asserted that M. Rochefort had told him ‘that he gave a sitting for a photograph [to Van Beers] and no more’.80 But some of the admiration was real. Sickert did consider the painting ‘a marvel of characterisation’ and regretted only that the original photograph could not be exhibited alongside, to reveal what had been gained by its translation into another medium.81
In the case of the Bradlaugh portrait, his own procedure was to trace the photograph carefully onto panel, and then pin the tracing up beside his easel, so that he might work from it ‘with the same freedom which an artist would use in painting from a drawing’.82 He made a point of announcing in the press that he was working from a photograph – and that he had got the photographer’s permission to use it.83 The process was considered daring, if not outrageous. Perhaps having maintained his radical credentials through this ploy, Sickert felt able to adopt a relatively conventional approach to the actual painting – giving it a more finished surface than his earlier works. Although at almost eight foot by four foot it was by far the largest picture he had attempted, progress was quick. It had to be. The painting needed to be ready for the official unveiling at the end of September.
He finished with time to spare and was able to accompany Ellen for a short holiday in Wales. They were guests at the country house of Sir Edward Watkin in Snowdonia. The railway magnate was working on a memoir of Richard Cobden and had been consulting Ellen about details of research.84 The hills and valleys do not seem to have engaged Sickert’s artistic imagination, but he climbed to the top of Snowdon and Cader Idris, and formed some happy memories of the place.85 The break, moreover, was convenient as it brought him close to Lancashire for the presentation of the Bradlaugh picture on 26 September.86
Sir Edward ‘delighted’ Sickert by insisting on accompanying him up to Manchester for the occasion.87 It was a Saturday evening and there was a large crowd of nearly six hundred Mancunian freethinkers gathered at the Rusholme Street Hall (formerly home to the town’s Plymouth Brethren) to see the picture unveiled. On the platform – above which hung the shrouded picture – Sickert sat with Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner and various other dignitaries from the local secularist community. After the meeting was brought to order, a Mr Foote ‘delivered an eloquent and much applauded address, in the course of which he unveiled the portrait amid a burst of cheering’.88 There were then more speeches, including a vote of thanks to Sickert proposed by Mrs Bradlaugh-Bonner, and seconded by Mr Foote. Mrs Bradlaugh-Bonner said that her father had had a ‘great admiration for Mr Sickert’ and that she had been ‘glad when she heard that he had been selected to paint the portrait, and