Walter Sickert: A Life

II A NEW HOME

My strongest memories of Walter as a boy are of his immense energy

& the variety & resourcefulness of his interests.

(Helena Sickert)

At the end of the summer of 1868 the Sickerts crossed the Channel and settled into a new home at 3 Windsor Terrace, Goldington Road, Bedford.1 The choice of Bedford was not an obvious one. There were no ties of family or existing friendship to draw them to this small but prosperous county town.2 There was no local art society to attract Oswald Sickert, and no illustrated satirical magazine to employ him. The recorded reason for the move was the number of excellent schools in the town. The five establishments endowed by the prosperous ‘Harper Charity’ had made Bedford a pedagogic centre with a staple production, according to one local guide, of ‘educated juvenile humanity’.3 Walter and his two brothers were enrolled at the local free school.4 But there was, too, perhaps some general principle of economy behind the choice: Bedford was less expensive than London.

Although Mrs Sickert’s allowance was increased to compensate for Oswald’s loss of salary in resigning from the Fliegende Blätter, the family was still relatively ‘poor’. The three-storey house in Windsor Terrace cost just £50 a year, and came fully stocked with a great deal of ‘mostly hideous’ furniture, built – as Helena remembered it – ‘to withstand the onslaughts of family life’. There were huge pier glasses, ‘a chiffonier with a marble top and curly-wiggly fronts’, and a sofa with three humps, which was soon dubbed ‘the camel’ and upon which it was impossible to lie with any degree of comfort. There was also a mahogany dinner table around which the family sat on chairs ‘with backs carved to represent swans’.5 But if Bedford was economical, that was all that could be said for it.

The town was not a success for the Sickerts. Coming from an international centre of music and art to the chill, provincial atmosphere of Middle England was a dispiriting experience. Mr and Mrs Sickert were ‘woefully depressed’.6 Their German maid, whom they had brought with them, was appalled. She took an immediate dislike to the place. She abhorred the house’s dirty coal grates and ranges, ‘accustomed as she was to [the] sweet wood ash’ of Bavaria. And she complained at the poor quality of the local beer.7 If the beer was bad, the water was worse. Almost as soon as the Sickerts arrived an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the town.8 It at once began to work its way through the family. The boys had barely started at their new school when they had to be removed. Walter soon fell ill. Mrs Sickert very nearly died.9 Only Oswald Sickert and Robert escaped the worst of it. Mrs Stanley, a family friend from Munich days, came to help with the children during the period of Ellen’s illness and convalescence. She was an ‘adored’ surrogate – vivacious and amusing. She would delight the children with her invented stories, one of which concerned the fantastical exploits of the ‘Black Bull of Holloway’ (probably Sickert’s first introduction to the artistic possibilities of that North London suburb). Mrs Stanley’s only fault was her kindness. She was apt to spoil her charges, and the young Sickerts, doubtless led – as they were in all else – by Walter, took advantage of her.10

Perhaps to remove his influence, Walter, as soon as he had recovered sufficiently from his illness, was sent, not back to his Bedford day school, but to a small boarding prep school at Reading.11 It was yet another instance of his being singled out for special treatment.12 Anne Sheepshanks lived nearby, but the proximity must have seemed a cruel jest to the 8-year-old Walter. He felt banished from the comforts of home life. His memories of the school were coloured with Dickensian horror. Many years later he told Virginia Woolf how the place was run by a ‘drunken old woman’ who, amongst her outrages, once beat a boy who had broken his arm while – as he put it – ‘we thirty little wretches lay there cowed’.13 The headmistress clearly took pleasure in such acts of cruelty, for it became one of Sickert’s verbal tics, when undertaking some disagreeable task, to remark, ‘And “what is more”, as my horrible old schoolmistress in Reading used to say, “I like it”.’14 He was very unhappy,15 and seems to have tried to project himself back to the lost paradise of Kleestrasse, writing home what his mother described as ‘such affectionate letters in such vile German’.16 In a delicious break from the tedious (and fattening) regimen of ‘bread and butter and sky blue’, he would go for Sunday lunch to his great aunt.* It was at Anne Sheepshanks’ table that he developed a precocious and enduring taste for jugged hare.17 But his readiest consolation came from work. As Mrs Sickert noted, despite his uneasiness of temper, he was ‘so fond of study’ and showed none of the ‘signs of idleness’ that his two younger brothers were already beginning to evince. Even at the age of nine Walter was ‘all ambition and energy’ – blessed with ‘a most clear head and accurate memory’.18

The Sickerts persevered at Bedford for a year. But the shock of the typhoid epidemic seems to have convinced them that it was not a suitable place to raise a family. In 1869, after consultation with Anne Sheepshanks, it was decided that they should move up to London.19 They fixed upon the modestly fashionable – and discreetly ‘artistic’ – quarter of Notting Hill, just across the way from the altogether grander, and more obviously artistic, quarter of Holland Park. Miss Sheepshanks found for them a little half-stucco-fronted house at 18 Hanover Terrace (now Lansdowne Walk), facing on to the communal gardens. It had been built, along with most of the others in the area, in the 1840s and was both slightly smaller and slightly more expensive than their Bedford home.20 There was an attic storey, and a basement, and two decidedly narrow main floors. Living arrangements were cramped. Walter and his two brothers had their bedrooms in the attic. Mr Sickert used one of the first-floor rooms as a studio, while the family ‘lived, worked, ate and played’ in the small red-flock-wallpapered dining room.21

By the time the Sickerts left Bedford, the deficiencies of the Reading boarding school were proving impossible to ignore, and Walter made the move to London along with the rest of the family. The relocation was a happy one for all. The Sickerts found old friends and connections. Their house became a sociable and lively place. The confraternity of painters came forward to welcome Oswald, among them several artists whom he had known from his days at Altona, Munich, and Paris. The sculptor Onslow Ford had worked at Munich and had married a friend of the Sickerts there.22 Frederic Burton, a student at Munich in the 1850s and now a successful and fashionable practitioner, called on the family. (Oswald was shocked, on entering the room, to discover one of his sons – almost certainly Walter – showing Burton through a bound volume of the Fliegende Blätter, pointing out the paternal drawings.)23 Hugh Carter, an artist who had spent time at Altona and married a girl from Hamburg, turned out to be a near neighbour at 12 Clarendon Road.24 The Sheepshanks name carried a weight and prestige in London that it rather lacked in provincial Bedford. In the capital, the achievements of the Revd Richard Sheepshanks and the munificence of his brother John were established facts. And this family fame reflected faintly on the Sickerts, giving them both a glow of glamour and – more importantly – a ‘social position’.25 Although Anne Sheepshanks was living out of London, the many friends she had in town provided a supportive structure for the young family. It was almost certainly through the influence of her friends the de Morgans that, in October 1870, Walter was enrolled (after a brief stint at a London ‘Dower School’) at University College School in Gower Street.26

Mrs Sickert conformed to what she considered were the established modes of English life. She took the children to church on Sunday mornings, walking them off to St Thomas’, Paddington, a little iron church off Westbourne Grove.27 It was a temporary structure, but the vicar, the Revd John Alexander Jacob, had a reputation as a preacher (his Building in Silence, and Other Sermons was published by Macmillan in 1875). Oswald Sickert did not attend, although, as a ‘tolerant minded agnostic’, he accompanied the family as far as the corner nearest the church and often met them coming out. The young Sickerts’ own involvement with proceedings was only slightly more engaged. Although they learnt the ‘Collect for the day’ and were taught their catechism by Mrs Sickert, their approach was so formal that, when asked ‘What is your name?’ they were liable to reply, ‘N or M as the case may be’.28 Walter showed no inclination towards the spiritual side of life. But churchgoing did have its social compensations. The Carters attended St Thomas’; and the Sickerts as they trooped up Holland Walk would also encounter the Raleighs, a lively family of one boy and five girls, children of the Revd Alexander Raleigh, who lived nearby.29

The move to England had a particular impact upon Oswald Sickert’s position. From being a cosmopolitan figure in a cosmopolitan milieu, he found himself a foreigner in an essentially English one. English, though he spoke it perfectly, was not his native – or even his second – tongue. Moreover, he no longer had a job or an income. Mrs Sickert wanted to make over to him the allowance that she received, but the terms of her trust made that impossible. Instead she drew her cheque every month and then handed over the cash to her husband, ‘so that she might have the pleasure of asking him for it, bit by bit’. Helena vividly recalled the playing out of this little charade: ‘It was her luxury to pretend he gave it to her, and his eyes would smile at her as he drew out his purse and asked, “Now how much must I give you, extravagant woman?” And she would say humbly, “Well, Owlie, I must get some serge for the little ones’ suits, and a new hat for Nell, and I want to bring back some fish. Will fifteen shillings be too much?” So she would get a pound and think how generous he was.’30 The fiction was a happy one but it could not quite obscure Oswald’s new, dependent status.

There were, in theory, some advantages to his new condition. Freed from the necessity of hackwork, he could rededicate himself exclusively to painting. London was a not unpropitious place for such a project. Compared to Munich, where the Kunstverein had exercised a virtual monopoly on exhibitions, there were several exhibiting groups and even a few commercial art galleries at which he could show. There were art collectors too. The example of John Sheepshanks had inspired several imitators, as the wealth generated by Britain’s ever expanding industrial and commercial imperium sought expression and dignity through art. With such patronage, artists were beginning to grow rich. The new mansions of Holland Park, with their lofty studio-rooms, were monuments to the fortunes being made in paint.31

Although Oswald had a painting room in the house, he soon took on a separate studio in Soho Square as well. Soho was some distance from Notting Hill, but it was close to Gower Street, and Oswald would walk the three and a half miles to UCS each morning with his eldest son. The link between them was reinforced. Walter would show off to his father. One of the challenges he undertook was to learn by heart the exotic polysyllabic name of the Indian Maharaja whose tombstone stood in the churchyard they passed each day. (Over seventy years later Sickert was still able to rattle off the name: Maharaja Meerzaram Guahahapaje Raz Parea Maneramapam Murcher, KCSI.)32 He was initiated, too, into his father’s professional world, accompanying him to buy materials at Cornelissen, the artists’ supply shop in Bloomsbury.33 The daily excursions into town, however, also made Walter aware of his father’s semi-alien status in their new home. Whenever they passed the shop of the friendly local cobbler, the man, ‘thinking in the English way, that it was necessary to shout and explain things to all foreigners, however well they spoke English’, would point at his display of porpoise-hide bootlaces and ‘roar at the top of his voice, “Papooze’s ‘ide!”’34 Perhaps it was the embarrassment of this daily performance that first inspired the slight note of protectiveness that came to colour Sickert’s view of his father – a protectiveness always mingled with real admiration, piety, and affection.35

The family maintained a European perspective. From the summer of 1870 onwards the unfolding drama of the Franco-Prussian war consumed their attention. Walter followed the rapid succession of French defeats in the pages of the Illustrated London News. It was a conflict that touched the Sickerts with painful closeness, setting familiar Germany against beloved France. Their sympathies lay entirely with the French. It was torture to Mrs Sickert when Dieppe was occupied by Prussian troops in December, and for Oswald when Paris fell at the beginning of the following year. French refugees became a feature of London life. Amongst the self-imposed exiles were several artists: Claude Monet came, and Camille Pissarro. The general exodus also brought a German painter – Otto Scholderer. After training at the Academy in Frankfurt, Scholderer had gone to Paris in 1857 and enrolled at the atelier of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. There he came to know Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and other members of the Parisian studio world. He returned to Paris at the end of the 1860s, and in 1870 Fantin-Latour, whose great friend he had become, included his diffident red-bearded figure, standing behind Edouard Manet, in the group portrait, the Atelier des Batignolles. It is not clear whether he already knew Oswald Sickert before he came to London – he never studied at Munich, nor did the two men coincide at Paris – but they soon became friends. They had a shared love of music, and would often play together, either at Hanover Terrace or at the Scholderers’ house at Putney.36

Such gatherings had a comfortably familiar air. In more ‘English’ society – though the Sickerts found many ready friends – there always remained the faint hint of ambiguity about their exact position. The Sheepshanks connection, so beneficial in all other respects, carried with it the taint of Mrs Sickert’s illegitimate origins – even if the details of those origins were not known to all and were often confused by those who were aware of them. (At least one friend supposed that Mrs Sickert was the natural daughter of John, rather than Richard, Sheepshanks.37) Amongst most members of the ‘artistic’ world Mrs Sickert’s position would have counted for little, but on the broader social plane the possibility of affront and insult – if remote – could never be entirely forgotten. There clung, too, to the family and to the family home, a slight but distinct sense of difference – of foreignness. The Sickerts played German music, sang German songs, and had German books on their shelves.38 They preserved the Munich habit of eating their ‘dinner’ at noon, and having only a light ‘tea’ or ‘supper’ in the evening – a fact that occasionally caused the children embarrassment when English visitors called.39 The family, according with Continental custom, celebrated Christmas on the night of Christmas Eve, and did so in what outsiders considered a ‘high Germanic’ fashion.40 These marks of otherness were small, but they were sufficient to give the Sickerts both a sense of closeness amongst themselves and of detachment from the world they found themselves in.

Of these two impulses, ‘detachment’ was the one that touched Walter most strongly. It became his mark as both a person and a painter. And though essentially an innate trait of his character, the tensions of his London childhood sharpened it and gave it direction. Walter did not retreat into his own world. From the start he engaged enthusiastically with English life and English ways. ‘Nobody,’ it was later said of him, ‘was more English.’ But his understanding of Englishness was gained from the outside. It was – as one English friend noted – ‘his northern foreign blood’ that ‘afforded him just the requisite impetus to understand especially well this country and its ways’.41

The upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War encouraged the Sickerts to spend their holidays in England. In the summer of 1870, Mr Sickert took Walter and the other children to the seaside at Lowestoft. While he sketched and painted, the boys flew kites and built sandcastles. Walter was much impressed too by the sight of a drowned man, and much excited by the sight of the lovely Mrs Swears, the beauty of the season, who would drive up and down the front in her carriage, her long hair streaming in the wind.42 In the following years they visited Ilfracombe and Harwich.43

Mrs Sickert did not accompany the family to Lowestoft, perhaps because she was pregnant. At the beginning of 1871, Walter got a new brother. Born on 14 February, he was duly christened Oswald Valentine. To simplify the logistics of family life, Walter was taken out of UCS and sent, along with Robert and Bernhard, to a new school close to Hanover Terrace. The Bayswater Collegiate School was situated at ‘Chepstow Lodge’, 1 Pembridge Villas, on the corner with Chepstow Place, four doors down (as Sickert liked to point out) from the celebrated Victorian genre painter, W. P. Frith. It was run by William T. Hunt, a young man in his early thirties with progressive ideas.44

Helena’s chief recollection of her brothers’ schooling was of them being chivvied off by their mother in the morning and then coming home in the afternoon without the books necessary for their prep. In the case of Robert and Bernhard such oversights tended to be the result of inattention; both brothers were what was called ‘dreamy’. If Walter forgot his books, however, it was probably because he was thinking of so many other things. Although he hated organized games, he was always ‘prodigiously energetic’, busy with something outside the school curriculum – acting, drawing, even learning Japanese. There were five Japanese boys at the school, sent to England by their feudal clan – Hachizuka – to study English. (All subsequently rose to positions of prominence in Japan.) Walter adopted them, and brought them back to Hanover Terrace. ‘We liked them better than the English boys,’ Helena recalled. She was particularly fond of Hamaguchi Shintaro – ‘a delightful little fellow’ with ‘exquisite manners’ who could play six games of chess at once.45 But it is uncertain how long the close connection lasted. Walter’s enthusiasms for people were not always sustained. Though ‘very sociable and charming’, he had – as his sister put it – ‘a way of shedding acquaintances and even friends’. Sometimes an actual quarrel precipitated the break, but more often there was merely a removal of favour, as his interest shifted on to somebody – or something – new. To the rejected, this exclusion from the charmed radiance of Walter’s friendship tended to come as a horrid and unexpected blow, and it was often left to Mrs Sickert to ‘comfort’ the unfortunates and excuse her son’s fickleness.46

Many years later, the novelist Hugh Walpole, describing Sickert’s character, remarked, ‘[he] isolates himself utterly from everybody’. It was not that he was ‘hermit like or scornful of life’. Far from it: he was ‘eager to hear anything about life at all … but his personality is so entirely of its own and so distinctive that he makes a world of his own’. And it is clear that even in childhood these traits were evident. While a person stood in some relation to Sickert’s current interest they enjoyed the favour of access to his world. But his interests changed often. As Walpole noted, there was no limit to them: ‘morals, families, personal habits, colours, games’.47 In 1904 Sickert explained to a female friend that he found absolutely everything ‘absorbingly interesting’, that there was ‘no end to the wonderful delights of life’. She felt that he was telling the truth, but considered that ‘such delightful fluency and ease [could] only come either from a dead heart or from a love, like God’s, that had done with personality and material things’.48

Walter, as a young child, did give some hints of a capacity for universal love. His mother reported that, while at Munich, he had asked her one night, before saying his prayers, ‘Mama, may I say God Bless all the world? I should like to say it because it would be kind.’49 But it seems more probable that his extraordinary relish for the incidents of life was another aspect of his detachment. A ‘dead heart’ is perhaps an unduly pejorative phrase. Although Sickert’s behaviour and his pronouncements, as both a child and a man, could sometimes seem unfeeling, even callous in their unflinching objectivity, there was something grand and invigorating about his enthusiasms, his openness to all sides of life, his refusal to accept hierarchies or to make judgements. He infected others, too, with verve. And though he might abandon his friends, many of them remained loyal to him and his memory even after he had moved on.

Walter’s schoolboy pursuits were legion. Inspired by the Prussians’ defeat of the Emperor Napoleon III, he created a variant of chess, called Sedan, in which the king could be taken.50 He also conceived a fascinated interest in the case of the Tichborne Claimant and followed its long unwinding closely. Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, the heir presumptive to the Tichborne Estates at Alresford, Hampshire, had sailed from Rio de Janeiro in 1854 at the age of twenty-five, in a ship that was lost at sea. No survivors were ever found. After the death of his father, Sir James, his younger brother, Alfred, assumed the title and estates, but died in 1866, leaving only an infant son. The old dowager Lady Tichborne, however, had never reconciled herself to the loss of her eldest son, and began to advertise abroad for news of his fate, hopeful that he had perhaps escaped the wreck. She was thrilled to receive word from a man in Australia who claimed to be her longlost boy. The man set sail for England at the end of 1866 and asserted his claim to be the Tichborne heir. In 1867 he was received by Lady Tichborne, who was living in Paris, and was apparently recognized by her as her son, even though there was no obvious physical resemblance, the claimant being a very stout man weighing some twenty stone and Roger Tichborne always having been conspicuously thin. His claim, unsurprisingly, was disputed by other members of the Tichborne family, and the matter went to court.

The trial was long-drawn-out and sensational, with its cast of minor aristocrats, duplicitous servants, old sea dogs, and colonial adventurers. The fat, bewhiskered, rather dignified claimant was the star of the show. Minutely cross-examined about the facts of his supposed early life by a defence intent on proving that he was not Roger Tichborne at all, but Arthur Orton, the opportunistic emigrant son of a Wapping butcher who, anxious to escape from his debts in Wagga Wagga, had embarked upon a career of profitable deception, he remained unperturbed and unperturbable. Public opinion was sharply divided on the question of his bona fides, and remained divided throughout the trial. As Sickert later wrote: ‘We are born believers in or doubters of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne’s identity.’ He was a born believer.51

His belief took a knock when the case collapsed in March 1871 and the claimant was arrested and charged with ‘wilful and corrupt perjury’. But the blow was not conclusive. The born believers held firm. While on bail awaiting trial (the new case was delayed for over a year) the claimant made a triumphal progress across England. In May 1872 he was given a hero’s welcome and a town parade at Southampton, not far from Alresford. When the second trial finally took place – it ran from February 1873 to February 1874 – the claimant was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. Even so, Sickert refused to relinquish his beliefs completely. ‘Are we even now quite sure,’ he wrote almost sixty years after the event, ‘of the rights in the matter of Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne?’52 The case never lost its appeal for him. The story of a relative disappearing into Australia, perhaps one day to return, exciting enough in itself, had an additional resonance for the grandson of Eleanor Henry.