The infant Walter Richard was an adored first child. His name was instantly familiarized to ‘Wat’. His birth precipitated a move to a first-floor flat at 25 Blumenstrasse. Perhaps there was more room at the new address. There certainly needed to be. Mr and Mrs Sickert – both only, and lonely, children – seem to have been determined to create the full and happy family life that they had never known. Barely eighteen months after Walter’s arrival a second child was born, christened Robert. And only a year after that, a third son. Following the tradition of choosing names that worked both in English and German, he was called Bernard or, more Teutonically, Bernhard.* So brisk was the succession of infants that Bernhard had to be suckled by a wet nurse.94
The advent of siblings did nothing to dilute the infant Walter’s power and position. He was very much the eldest child. As a toddler he was precocious, winning, and lovely to look at. Eleanor, in later years, ‘never wearied of telling about his beauty and his perfect behaviour as a baby’ – rather to the irritation and surprise of his younger siblings who knew him as a less docile (though still beautiful) child.95 He had, too, a natural gift for self-dramatization. Even at the age of three his sudden entrance into the family sitting room one evening was so arresting that his parents’ friend Füssli, who was visiting, insisted on painting him. The picture – a life-size representation of the very young Walter holding an apple while clad only in a short nightshift, his huge mop of flaxen curls surrounding a ‘rosy face and solemn blue eyes’ – was in due course presented to the family and prominently hung in the living room. Walter grew up under this quasi-heroic image of himself. In later years he would describe it as his ‘first appearance on any stage as Hamlet’. It was clear that, even at the age of three, he had a desire to play the title role.96
The picture must also have served as a reminder of his everchanging appearance. The following year he effected the first of what would be many dramatic transformations. Or rather it was effected for him. ‘Wat’s head looks like a broom,’ his mother wrote, ‘now that the long curls are off.’ The short crop was perhaps well suited to his physique and temperament. ‘He is an immense fellow,’ his mother declared proudly, ‘taller and broader than the generality of boys at his age’, though she did admit that he had still ‘such a baby face’. This cherubic face, it was noted, masked a fearsome will: ‘He is very perverse and wayward, and wants a very tight hand.’ Too much ‘tenderness’ enabled him ‘to give way to his temper’.97 The tight hand, however, was one that only Eleanor could employ. Later in the same year she was remarking, Walter is not very easy to leave with the servants, I can make him mind without much trouble. With them He is master.’98 There was, however, no doubting his intelligence. He delighted in books, and with only the minimum of parental encouragement taught himself to read and write before he was four.99
In 1864, King Maximilian died and was succeeded by his son, the Wagner-loving eccentric Ludwig II – someone more ‘perverse and wayward’ than even the 4-year-old Walter Sickert. At almost the same moment, Mrs Sickert gave birth to a fourth child, a girl, christened Helena but known (like her mother) as Nellie. The ever-expanding young family moved once again, to a flat on the first floor at No. 4 Kleestrasse.100 This new address became the Sickerts’ most longstanding Munich home. It was set in a short cross-street running between the Bayerstrasse and the Schwanthalestrasse, close to the large park-cum-showground, the Theresienwiese, where the city’s annual Oktoberfest was held. Comforts were rather sparse. If there were no rates to pay on the flat, it was because no services were provided. There was no piped gas, no running water, and, of course, no water closet. There was, however, a maid to help with fetching and carrying, with getting wood for the fires, and water for the basins.
Life in the new flat was crowded, even cramped, but happy. Although there were regular excursions to the shops, to the Botanical Gardens (to feed the fish) and to the Theresienwiese (to roll on the grass), the whole family spent much of each day indoors. There was no nurse and no nursery. Eleanor sat, looking over the four young children in the living room, sewing and mending, while Oswald worked in a small adjoining studio room.101 Mrs Sickert was blessed with the rare ‘health and energy and courage’ necessary to bring up a large family on a small income. Food, she made sure, was always plentiful and nourishing, if simple – very simple. Jam was a rare event; sweets a once-a-year Christmas treat. Even birthdays were marked only with ‘plain cake’. The Sickerts adopted the Bavarian custom of having their main meal at midday. A rather frugal ‘tea’ of bread, butter, and milk, eaten at six, represented the children’s evening meal. The parents had a later but scarcely less frugal supper.102 Bread, rice, potatoes, oats and sago were the abundant staples of the Sickert table. They were often combined with the notoriously thin Bavarian milk into what the family called ‘pluffy puddings’.* It was a regimen of unexampled blandness which goes some way to explaining Walter’s later relish for the good things of French, Italian, and even British cuisine. Nevertheless, throughout his life, at times of crisis he would seek solace in the comforting familiarity of rice pudding or bread-and-milk.
Mrs Sickert was what her daughter called ‘an admirable baby mother’, with a real love of young children and a real gift for keeping them occupied, amused, and in order.103 Under her direction, Walter and his siblings devised their own entertainments. There was little money for toys, and it was thought better that they should make their own. Their mother’s workbasket was the principal source of materials, as they constructed miniature box carts with cotton-reel wheels, or transformed wooden button moulds into spinning tops. Their father’s old cigar boxes became ‘blocks of flats’, fitted out with acorn furniture. There was, however, a constant danger that the play – invariably led by Walter – would grow wild. Oswald Sickert was not a natural ‘baby father’. He had a ‘highly nervous’ temperament and found the stress of weekly deadlines and daily distractions hard to endure. Sometimes he would startle the children by bursting into the living room, interrupting their games with a despairing plea, ‘Can’t you keep these children quieter?’ He would, as Helena recalled, immediately regret the outburst; his wife ‘had only to turn reproachful eyes on him to bring his arms round her and a tender plea for forgiveness. Then he would steal away and we would look guiltily at each other and behave like mice.’104 But even without such irruptions, the children’s spells of furious practical activity alternated with ‘periods of silent contemplation’. Walter might take up a book. He was a voracious reader throughout his childhood.105 And Mrs Sickert would sometimes lay the flat tin top of the travelling bath on the floor and say it was a raft, on which the children would clamber aboard and ‘drift away on dim voyages’ of the mind.106
It was a cultured home. Music played a large part in family life. Mrs Sickert sang constantly at her work as she watched over her brood. Most evenings she and Oswald would make music together, Oswald accompanying her as she sang, and then playing on for ‘an hour or so’ on his own. Beethoven and Schumann were favourites.107 In the Munich of Ludwig II it was impossible to escape entirely from the music of Wagner. His operas were performed frequently at the Hoftheater, breaking up the more conventional repertoire