Walter Sickert

Although Walter Sickert was only twenty-three years old he was already well prepared to make the most of all he saw and heard in Paris . Oswald Adelbert Sickert, his father ( 1828-85), was a capable painter and draughtsman, who studied in Paris with Couture - and his father, Johann Jurgen Sickert ( 1803-64) was also a painter and head of a firm of decorators employed in the Royal Palace of Denmark. (The family was originally Danish, but Walter Sickert's father acquired German nationality as a result of Germany's seizure of Schleswig-Holstein but was subsequently naturalized in England, where he settled in 1868 with his English wife.) Sickert himself was born in Munich on 31 May 1860. The family was harmonious and united, and Sickert therefore eagerly assimilated, instead of reacting against, as might otherwise have been the case, the sober, professional attitude towards the arts of his father and his grandfather. Of his father Sickert declared that he never forgot anything he told him.

At King's College, London , he must have laid the foundations of an excellent education, especially in the classics, for he read Latin and Greek with pleasure throughout his life. After going down he wished to become a painter, but his father warned him against the uncertainties of an artist's career; so he fell back upon his second choice, the stage. For three years he acted, on occasions in Irving 's company, but although he took only minor parts his experience in the theatre was not an irrelevant interlude. It confirmed a love of the stage that lasted as long as his life, and, it is reasonable to assume, the histrionic elements in his own temperament. In 1881 he became a student of the Slade School , under Alphonse Legros, but a chance meeting with Whistler caused him to leave the well-trodden path. 'You've wasted your money, Walter', he jibed; 'there's no use wasting your time too,' and Sickert went off to help Whistler print his etchings. By forsaking Gower Street for Tite Street , Sickert entered a new world, for in the studio of Whistler he found himself remote from the Slade and near to the mainstream of European painting.

The at first almost daily association with Whistler was one of the two most important relationships of Walter Sickert's life. Walter Sickert once wished to introduce D. S. MacColl to him, and identified him as the author of an article in 'The Saturday Review' entitled "Hail, Master!" 'That's all very well, "Hail, Master!" But he writes about Other People, Other People, Walter!' 'Of course', Sickert added, 'with Whistler there was always a twinkle.' In time the friendship waned. In 1897 Whistler, giving evidence against him in a lawsuit, described him as 'an insignificant and irresponsible person'. For a man of Walter Sickert's independence, friendship on the terms which Whistler demanded could not have been of long duration, but there existed a still more active cause of disruption: Sickert's admiration for the Master became more and more tempered with criticism, until at last Whistler's art came pre-eminently to stand for some of the weaknesses which Sickert most abhorred.

In 1882, he has told us, he began a campaign in the Press on the Master's behalf which he did not wind up until ten years later. Subsequent references to Whistler contain searching criticism; at last there appeared an article entitled 'Abjuro' which was, in his own words, 'an explicit repudiation of Whistler and his teaching'. It is not, however, in ' Abjuro' that Sickert gives most explicitly his reasons for his repudiation. When the Pennells' 'The Life of J. McN. Whistler' appeared, Walter Sickert reviewed it at length. Here he gave his most considered estimate of his master. Insisting that Whistler's art is dominated by his taste he developed the theme that 'Taste is the death of a painter'. 'An artist', he contended, has all his work cut out for him, observing and recording.