Walter Richard Sickert

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

IT WAS an evening at the end of April, 1918. I had JUST RETURNED TO LONDON FROM FINISHING SOME kind of military course near by. During the three weeks that it had lasted I had seen no intelligent person. I was lodged in the house of a suburban family, and I remember that one of the rooms, commodious but suffocatingly full of small objects, contained a desk at which my hostess kindly allowed me to write letters. On it stood a large calendar, in which almost every day of every week had been marked off and annotated, in the most sable of mourning inks, as the anniversary of some family catastrophe. Sometimes a note of censure was implicit in the tone of the entry — in, for instance, “This morning, thirty years ago, Uncle Arthur’s long course of unfortunate practices incurred their melancholy but inevitable culmination”; at others, comment was merely simple and moving — as in “Today, twenty-four years have passed since Mama found her Maker.” But this calendar was the sole object to exhale any originality: all else seemed stale. Yet, perhaps it was those very surroundings that had put it into my head to wire to my brother and ask him to invite Walter Richard Sickert to dinner the night I was returning to London: I knew I could make nothing of this house, and Sickert was assuredly the only person who could have extracted out of it a work of art, able as he was to take the heavy Sunday boredom of the suburbs, and by some magic of hand and eye transmute it into beauty, thus recording it, transfigured and yet true, for as long as pictures endure. . . . All this monotony, however, made my return home, a few minutes before dinner, seem more delightful.

Swan Walk, Chelsea, was a quiet and leafy backwater, with all its buildings on the eastern side. Some of the houses, of sooty, yellow brick, had been erected in the eighteenth century, but the house in which my brother and I were living — and the atmosphere of which, Sickert used to insist, was summed up in Gray’s famous line: —

Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm —

was a rather tall modern house, which looked over the wall of the Physic Garden and afforded, beyond it to the south, a view of the river.

As I approached, I saw a tall, bearded man standing in the road. He stood in the middle of this silent and empty road, looking through the archway in the wall, with its iron gate, into the large, green area of the Physic Garden, its strips of lawn varied with early flowering magnolias and other shrubs, and with old mulberry trees, as yet hardly in leaf. Out of all these things the sun was weaving a thousand intricate and living designs, and it shone, too, full upon the face of the stranger, showing it in detail against a background of sooty brick. He did not see me; he thought himself alone; his face wore a peculiarly keen look of observation, or of comprehension, as of someone in the act of saying, “Oh, I understand!” and bis eyes held a rapt and penetrating expression. His curling – or rather, waving — gray hair showed at the sides of the half tall hat of rough black fell he was wearing — and then I recognized this stranger. It was Sickert! And in a new disguise he had adopted since I had seen him a month previously. It consisted of a dark, poacher‘s coat with large pockets with flaps, and a pair of shepherd‘s-plaid trousers. Under his arm he carried a square parcel done up in brown paper. The fan-shaped beard spread out over his stiff single collar and bow tie, and it perhaps made the finely cut face, with its concavities, unusual at his age, seem broader than it was. It blurred, too, a little the boldness of the features, but nothing could obscure the cool keenness of the gray-blue eyes, full of light, or the acuteness of the whole head, which constituted part of its invariable handsomeness.

Suddenly he saw me approaching, gave a charming, friendly smile, and at once began to sing a verse of a comic song that he knew amused me. It was, he had told me, a song that was said to have been popular with ex-soldiers after the Crimean War, when talk of starting a new conflict filled the air, and it certainly expressed my own views about the current dispute.

There he stood, in the middle of the empty road, in the sunlight of a spring evening, most carefully rendering the words, deliberately, as if it were a matter of importance, and converting his whole appearance into a box, as it were, for the production of this song.

This is the likeness of Sickert that comes back to me at the moment, though in the two or three preceding years since our first meeting I had been given, goodness knows, the opportunity to achieve a dozen true and striking portraits of the different persons contained in the same man. He was protean; I had seen Sickert as he was, the great artist kerneled in the shell of the strikingly good-looking man-of-thr-world, armed with a wit that few could emulate and none surpass, conscious of his powers and able to hold his own in any society (doubtless anyone who, when young, had come under Whistler’s influence would have learned both the ways of the world and how to treat them, and certainly Sickert possessed the perfect man-of-the-world‘s way of rendering to Caesar not only the things that are — or were — Caesar‘s, but something extra, though perhaps the indefinable and evasive mockery of the artist underlay the whole of this attitude, if one looked closer); I had seen Sickert the good host and kind friend to the young; Sickert the lion comique, as Max Beerbohm has shown him, bawling out the comic songs of the seventies and eighties; Sickert the painter, too deeply absorbed to allow his personality to star for the day in any single one of its particular roles; Sickert the elegant, with the imperial; Sickert the Irvingesque actor, producing effortlessly, sonorously, the great speeches from Lear or Hamlet, or quoting Latin to me, passages probably from Martial; Sickert full of common sense; Sickert full of mockery; and finally — and it was among my favorites — Sickert the chef, in the white clothes appropriate to the day‘s trade. Yet none of the aspects he offered in this fashion were without a genuine foundation in his character: he could cook, for example, surprisingly well, this being the result of the interest he took in food, an interest often reflected in his writings, by a phrase or reference, and similarly present in his conversation. Thus he was wont to complain despairingly of Roger Fry: “Roger‘s motto is ‘I don’t care what I eat — so long as it comes out of a tin!‘ ”

Into this culinary criticism entered, I apprehend, other reflections of large issue and of wider range; such as that a painter must not use “preserved” models, and, if he wants to paint flowers, or even fruit, must get to work on them quickly, their fragrance and freshness being qualities that he must, snatch at, and not labor for so long to portray that they will or become moldy, and have to be replaced with thick counterfeit shapes cut out of cardboard or oilcloth. Again he was aware that to perceive accurately, and to work at his best, an artist must be properly nourished — this truth he had no doubt learned in France — and in several of his essays he deplores the growing adulteration of English food, and the consequent poisoning and blunting of men‘s senses. But then, in alt things, he evinced a tremendous feeling for material; and I well remember the air of gravity and concentration with which, looking at me one day, he remarked — for I was in uniform — “ You ought always to wear a good blue serge suit.” And no picture of him would be complete that did not include the fact that all his own clothes were, if you noticed, extremely good of their kind, whatever the nature of the particular role he might favor for the day or the week.

2

IN the years in which I saw most of him, though perhaps he was a little neglected at that time by the professional mobs engaged in adapting for the English market the latest Paris modes, Sickert’s studio was apt to be thronged, for the young writers of my generation, and many of the painters, revered him; and after us, similarly, the next generation, more especially of painters, such as those composing the Euston Road Group. The later heirs of the English School regarded him as the man who had safeguarded their inheritance, and who, by the virtuosity of his brush, no less than by the choice for it of his subjects, which he never failed to discover in the life round him, had enabled the native tradition to continue.

The veins of ore he revealed were indeed rich, He had, from the first, adopted a rigid policy of following the truth, in whatever direction it might lead him. Alone of his contemporaries in this country, he had recognized, first that it was essential for the artist to unearth and expose the current and active beauty of the contemporary world, to find it in the soiled faces, in the shabby clothes, in the infinite variety of the drab and ordinary, and not merely to decorate life, as his first master, Whistler, had been content to do; secondly, to paint it, as well as to record it. Where portraits were concerned, he preferred to paint the people of the dustbin rather than the pearl-fettered lay figures and images, embalmed and enameled, of the drawing room. His subjects might have been found by Hogarth: to them he brought the contemporary richness of French art, grafting it onto the rougher stock, without in the least impairing the ingenuousness or other special qualities of the English School. As themes for his pictures, he took the very flesh and bone of humanity, and subjects trite, often, rather than picturesque. He despised no appeal to sentiment in the titles he chose for them, and it was plain that his eye and hand caught fire from his heart.

The mastery of paint, by which he was able to show a new beauty in the unbeautiful, he attained —and was only able to attain—because it was based on sound drawing. He continually recalled Degas’s example and admonishment in this respect. Nor did he ever tire of emphasizing that the word for artist in Greek meant joiner in the first place, and nothing more. And his citation of this, in its turn, throws a certain light on his love of squaring-up his drawings.

To transfer a drawing to canvas, the custom of an artist is to rule the drawing into squares of equal size, next to cover the canvas with precisely the same number of squares as the drawing, but smaller or larger, as the case may be, and then to copy into each square on the canvas the portion of the drawing contained in the corresponding square. This practice is particularly useful to the painter, because it gives him the precise angle and intersection of a line, where it enters and crosses a square. Where the painting was larger than the drawing, Sickert used, further, often to cut out the little square from the drawing, so as to be able to place it in the larger square of the painting, and thus to be able to measure more accurately still. In time, he came to prefer the look of a draw ing that had been squared up, and I have heard him maintain that the process greatly improved the look of any good drawing. In the paintings founded on the drawings, however, all the squares are completely resolved, as in the best carpentry. . . . And, indeed, Sickert was right: the true, the original significance of the Greek word artist should be remembered where any art is concerned. To take the writ ing of prose alone, the joining of paragraph to paragraph, and of meaning to meaning, the transition from one to another, the elision of the unnecessary and elimination of the redundant, and finally, a proper respect for material and purpose, and an absolute control, I take to be its very essence.

As for the principles of painting, he disliked any softness of line and displayed an especial hatred for the nebulous and vague, for muzziness and blur. . . . Some of the opinions which he expressed in this respect, and in others, curiously resembled those of William Blake, an artist for whom he fell no particular love, and of whose writings on this matter I believe him to have been ignorant. ’I bus Wake, in A Descriptive Catalogue, writes: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art, and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.” They agreed, too, about copying from nature, for in his Public Address Blake says: “No Man of Sense ever supposes that copying from Nature is the Art of Painting. If Art is no more than this, it is no better than any other Manual Labour: anybody may do it, and the fool will often do it best as it is a work of no Mind.” And Sickert often expressed the same view.

3

THE studio which Sickert occupied in Fitzroy Street had once been Whistler’s, and arriving there constituted, for the novice, a rather intimidating ordeal, as well as a memorable experience. Two factors joined, I believe, to render it alarming; the first was the narrow, angular corridors and staircases that led to it —or rather into it —and were unlike anything with which I was acquainted. These long passages composed of glass and dingy painted tin, clamped to the sides of the house, suggested, I can see now, a faint prophetic vision of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other forgotten Ufa masterpieces, as well as something of an Amusement Park, as it is called, of sw itchbacks and zigzags and scenic railways, for the staircases mounted and descended unexpectedly, and the final flight seemed to leap forward into (he studio itself. The second of the factors that inspired fright was the size of the crowd into which those last steep steps threw —or tripped– you: for Sickert was most hospitable, and always invited to his weekly tea parties a great number of people, especially young artists and students from the schools at which he taught. The studio, however, was friendly as well as large and impressive. Indeed, large and impressive studios were part of the code he recommended, for their own prosperity, to all artists.

“My advice to a young painter who wants to get on is ‘Take a large studio! If you can’t afford to take one, take two!”

He did not feel, as some artists have felt, a need either for stimulants or sedatives to excite or lull his creative gifts: he was compact of energy, slavedriven though an artist always is. Even his art did not exhaust his vital forces. It left him a margin, and plenty of it: hence the jokes, the quips, the seriousness, the fun, the acting, the singing, the snatches of old music-hall songs and even of hymn tunes, the disguises, the beards, the dancing, the declaiming, all those things, so characteristic of him, that persons who did not comprehend the nature and force of this great painter might stigmatize as posing or clowning, but which were, in reality, merely a way of using up that superfluous energy with which he was so fortunately endowed.

Much has been made by some writers of the fact that acting was Sickert‘s first profession. The painter encouraged this v iew of himself; he liked to remind his friends of his days in the theater, and to talk of Irying—in whose company he had played, as a very young man, various small parts and of other famous actors. But when Sickert emphasized a special point, it was always well for anyone, novic or initiate, to be on his guard, and though his first trade had left its relics in his personality, though there may have been histrionic trails every now and then in, for example, the choice of titles for his canvases, or again, in the typical use in various of his essays of some such phrase as “the prompt-side of the picture,” nevertheless to me it seems more important to remember that, with all its lure, and in spite of an undoubted gift for it, Sickert abandoned the stage for painting, and to recall instead the brief but multitudinous hours of a long life, absorbed as they were by the powers and processes of pictorial creation.

It may be that he altered his personal style thus, so often, from sheer love of variety, because he began to like a square beard more than a pointed, in the same way that he altered his signature, suddenly convinced that Richard was a much more pleasing name than Walter, that there was thus reason in being Richard, and none in being Walter; it may have been due to the opinion he held, and upon which I have heard him insist, “that an artist should be allowed every kind of fun, including the fun of growing old,” or it may be that these quick changes served an altogether more serious purpose and helped to promote his painting.

4

THE air of the studio was impregnated with the smell of coffee. Sunlight lay in pools on the floor, and Sickert would move about, talking, now going to take in the bread —just arrived from the shop round the corner, incidentally one of the best bakers in London — now to receive the morning papers, or to keep an eye on whatever it might be that was cooking on the large stove. Great painters are proverbially able to divine the most tremendous patterns in accidental stains, and Sickert carried it further, and could distinguish marvels of composition in a second-rate picture. Perhaps he had bought this the day before in some shop behind Fitzroy Street, and now, between the newspapers and the toast, he would sit down and gaze at it for a moment, silent with wonder. With his very conscious intelligence, he must have himself recognized the existence of this characteristic, for in one of his essays he wrote; —

To the really creative painter . . . the work of other men is mainly nourishment, to assist him in his own creation. . . . That is one reason why the laity is wise to approach the criticism of art by an artist with the profoundest mistrust. . . .

SSo it was, then, that he would contemplate, with a kind of calculating rapture, some flower piece, a ssmall panel of roses, it may have been, painted by a French artist of the 1850s. After a time he would explain its merits, its real merits; for, since he put them there, they were real enough, though perhaps

absent in this particular piece. Manet, he would remark, though not the greatest of painters, as English people now tried to make out, had known how to paint roses: that he had known, at least—but this obscure and forgotten artist knew it better! You could see that they had been brushed in rapidly, during the half hour or so in which the blooms were fresh, and before they had changed to something else.

At other times it would be a cartoon that had caught his fancy. He had cut it out of a newspaper and pinned it up on the wall, and now extolled it. There, if you liked drawing, was drawing for you; real drawing by a man who, since he had been compelled to turn out something expressively comic every day — every single day, mind you — for many years, had by this time been obliged to find out a little about his job. Or it might be a Rowlandson color print he had discovered. Or, on one occasion, even, the chosen cynosure had proved to be four particularly atrocious Indian color prints — so I call them, though it is impossible to imagine what evil technical process can have been responsible for these seven-armed goddesses, with inflated multiple limbs and naked except for the miters they were wearing on their heads, who pirouetted ungracefully on lotuses, while they displayed their Cambridge-blue charms and handed objects of an equivocal nature to elephants smaller than themselves and colored like blush roses. . . . For a day or two Sickert was fascinated by these, but then, tiring of them, he caused them to be framed, and brought them round to Swan Walk. Indeed, they had composed that brown paper parcel which we saw under his arm as he stood in the sunlight of that spring evening, and he had given them to my brother and myself, with the words, “These may help you to keep straight in your ideals of female beauty.”

Other guests would begin now to arrive, and, tearing himself away from the Haselden drawing out of the Daily Mirror, or from whatever might constitute the particular favorite of the moment, he would go to greet them. Often I would meet at these breakfast parties Nina Hamnett, Álvaro Guevara, W. H. Davies, and Aldous Huxley. . . . Our host would make us sit down at the table, and would hurry round with breakfast, a plate with an egg on it for each of us. Owing to the amount of cooking, serving, and pouring out that he was forced to do, he had not always at this hour so much leisure for conversation as his guests would have liked. His talk resembled most good talk in that it contained in its web certain invariable strands, certain immutable monuments that could be invoked for purposes of reference, allusion, comparison, and simile, and that also supplied him with an established standard. The Tichborne Case and the mystery of Jack the Ripper constituted two such monuments.

The first, which had come into the headlines when Sickert was a boy of eleven, had always maintained its interest for him; a special interest, due to the fact that he believed the rejected claimant, who had come back out of the sea, to have been the rightful heir.... As for the second, apart from the intrinsic and abiding horror of that extraordinary series of crimes, it interested him because he thought he knew the identity of the murderer.

Sickert would talk more often, however, of beings of another, though scarcely of a less exceptional, kind; of Whistler, Degas, Charles Keene, of Toulouse-Lautree and the curious manifestations of the inferiority complex produced by his dwarfish stature, of Beardsley and Wilde. . . . Wilde he appeared not to have liked greatly, or considered particularly witty, though he admitted that he provided an unusually warm and generous audience for others.

Sickert would speak, too, of Frank Harris and his portentous absurdity. Thus I recollect his telling us of a supper party at the Savoy in the nineties at which he had been present. It had been arranged, he became aware as soon as he sat down, so that Harris should be able to impress a Scottish millionaire from whom he wanted to borrow money. But his intended victim was singularly hardheaded, tightfisted and tongue-tied. The silences were long. In one of them Harris boomed out — and he possessed a voice which could easily reach to the further corners of the restaurant — “ But what would Goethe say?” Whereat, roused by a name so familiar, the people at most of the tables had stood on their chairs, in order to look dotingly at Miss Gertie Millar, who was sitting with some friends not so far away, for they were naturally under the illusion that. Harris must be referring to her.

Or he would tell us of George Moore — whom he did not care to see very often in later days —■ and of his abiding ingenuousness. Thus, once Moore had sent for him in the small hours, insisting that the matter was of importance. When Sickert arrived, wondering what it could be, Moore had stood up and announced, with that particular rhythm of voice unforgettable to those who knew him, “I have just been reading a book on Michelangelo, and it ɑ-ppcars that he carved the David out of a piece of marble that had been improperly quarried. Now I could no more have carved the David out of a piece of marble that had been Improperly quarried than I could have flown.” . . . And on another occasion, after receiving a similar urgent nocturnal summons, he found that Moore had been reduced almost to the verge of tears by the bewildering difficulty of the problem, recurrent through that day — and, indeed, through the whole of his preceding lifetime: how to keep his pants in place. . . . Sickert had been obliged to explain it to him at great length. . . . “If, Moore, you look at the top of your pants, you’ll find two loops of tape on each side, and if you thread the two tabs of your braces through them, your troubles will be at an end.” . . . Delighted, dumfounded, too, by the ingenuity of the solution, he had replied, “But you are an ɑ-mazing man, my dear Sickert, to discover such a thing.”

Sometimes, again, Sickert would talk of the London of his youth, telling me of my grandfather Londesborough’s horses, of his coaches and carriages, which had been especially line, for — in this resembling so many English artists before him — Sickert possessed a keen eye for horseflesh and a smart turnout. And usually, in all that be said, there was an element of the unexpected, both in phrasing and in opinion. . . . Let me try to give an instance of, at any rate, the last.

In the spring of 1919, it had been planned to hold an exhibition in London of etchings by Félicien Rops. The Customs House officials, however, having opened a parcel containing them, had pronounced them obscene, and had ordered them to be destroyed. This caused an uproar among art lovers. Everyone, in studios and galleries and museums, rose up in arms about it —a great artist like Rops to be treated in such a way! Questions were to be asked in Parliament, and there was talk of a deputation to the Prime Minister. . . . One morning, when I went to breakfast with Sickert, and arrived there a moment or two later than usual, I found him already discussing the matter with some of his guests. He appeared to he genuinely pleased at the action of the officials, and enthusiastic in his praise of them.

“They ought to make the Customs House into the Ministry of Fine Arts,” he was saying. “Here Rops has deceived all the critics for years into thinking him a great artist. But you can’t monkey about with the Customs Mouse! You can’t take them in! They saw through it in a minute, and said, ‘That’s not Art: that’s PORNOGRAPHY!’ — and they’re quite right. . . . But nobody before them had had the wits or the courage to say it! ... I wish one of them could he given Konody’s job on the Observer. ... I daresay the postman — there he is, by the way! — would do just as well. Common sense, that’s the thing. . . . You can’t, better common sense, whether it‘s politics or business or art!”

He always seemed to he in good spirits in the morning, but breakfast was passing quickly, the big bowls of coffee were empty, and the guests began to leave. Sickert got up to escort Davies to the front door, fearing that the wooden stump that served the poet as a leg might give him trouble in mounting or descending the steep stairs. He watched him dipping slowly away down the long street, a large bundle of etchings his generous host bad just given him held under his arm. . . . Sickert seemed to have enjoyed himself, but no doubt he was glad to settle down to work, to shut his own door and know that he need not — and would not — open it.