Read the book: «Walter Sickert: A Life»

I THE MÜNCHENER KIND’L’

He is a dear little fellow.

(Eleanor Sickert to Oswald Adalbert Sickert)

Walter Richard Sickert was born on 31 May 1860 in a first-floor flat at 59 Augustenstrasse, Munich, in what was then the independent kingdom of Bavaria.¹ He was the first-born child of Oswald Adalbert Sickert and his wife Eleanor. Oswald Sickert was a Dane, from the town of Altona in the Duchy of Holstein. He was a trained artist, with ambitions as a painter, but he was constrained to work as a hack draughtsman-on-wood for a Bavarian illustrated comic-paper called the Fliegende Blätter. Eleanor – or Nelly as she was known by her affectionate husband and her friends and relatives – was English by birth. The couple spoke mainly English at home.² Their new son was christened by the English chaplain at Munich: he was given the names Walter Richard.³ Walter was chosen as being a name that looked – even if it did not sound – the same in both English and German.⁴ Richard was the name of the boy’s maternal grandfather, the late Revd Richard Sheepshanks, a figure whose presence loomed over the young family, half beneficent, half reproachful.

Richard Sheepshanks had not been a conventional clergyman. He had scarcely been a clergyman at all. He never held any cure. His interest in the celestial sphere, though keen, had been scientific. He made his reputation as an astronomer and mathematician. The Sheepshanks came of prosperous Yorkshire stock. The family in the generation before had made a fortune in cloth, supplying – so it was said – material for military greatcoats to the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. The money from the Leeds factories amassed in this profitable trade allowed Richard and his five siblings to indulge their interests and enthusiasms. One brother, Thomas, chose Brighton and dissipation.⁵ Another, John, dedicated himself to art: he moved to London and built up a large and important collection of English paintings, which he exhibited to the public at his house in Rutland Gate and bequeathed to the nation in 1857, six years before his death.^*6

Richard turned to the sciences. A brilliant university career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was crowned with a mathematics fellowship in 1817. He briefly contemplated the prospect of both the law and the Church and secured the necessary qualifications for both. (Having taken holy orders, he always styled himself ‘the Reverend’.) On receiving his inheritance, however, he was able to direct all his considerable energies to scientific research. He became a member of the Geological and Astronomical Societies, and was for several years the editor of the latter’s Monthly Notes. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the University of London. His interests were many, ranging from demographics to the study of weights and measures. He had a particular passion for fine scientific instruments and devoted most of his income to buying them. He also busied himself in the intellectual and political disputes of the scientific world.⁷

In scientific circles Richard Sheepshanks was greatly respected – much loved by his friends and not a little feared by his enemies. He was, in the restrained words of his close colleague, the astronomer Augustus de Morgan, a man of ‘very decided opinions’. And he was not shy of expressing them. His first professional training had been as a lawyer, and throughout his academic career he had a relish for controversies. He was, as he himself put it, well suited to such business, having ‘leisure, courage and contempt for opinion when he knew he was right’. He was well armed with a ready, if somewhat sarcastic, wit and a piquant turn of phrase. But in matters of what he considered to be of real importance he would – according to one obituarist – drop these weapons in favour of a more ‘earnest deportment’ and a more ‘temperate’ utterance. Despite being of ‘hardly middle stature’, having red-tinged hair and the inevitable side-whiskers of mid-Victorian fashion, he was, from the evidence of his portraits, a handsome man. He was also excellent company – clever, witty, well read in both the classics and in modern literature, and widely travelled in Europe.⁸ He was knowledgeable too about art; and, tipped off by his brother John, commissioned Thomas Lawrence to paint a portrait of his beloved elder sister, Anne.⁹

Anne Sheepshanks was as remarkable as her brother. A woman of enormous practical capability, intelligence, and sound sense, she encouraged and supported Richard in all his endeavours. She allied her resources to his, sharing his interests, his cares, and his house. The home they established together at 30 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury – not far from the British Museum – became a lively gathering place for many of the intellectual luminaries of scientific London. They even built their own small observatory in the garden, from which, in an age before saturated street-lighting, they were able to mark the passage of the stars.¹⁰

The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks – like his sister – never married. His fellowship at Cambridge was dependent upon his remaining a bachelor, and he seems to have been in no hurry to give up his position, his salary, or his independence. Nevertheless, he did not allow professional considerations to stand altogether between him and the opposite sex.

It is not known exactly how or when he encountered Eleanor Henry. Indeed, very little is known about Eleanor Henry at all, except that she was Irish, fair-haired and handsome, and was a dancer on the London stage.¹¹ Perhaps Mr Sheepshanks picked her out of a chorus line. Or perhaps he met her in the street. At the beginning of the 1830s she was living in Henrietta Street, a little cul-de-sac behind Brunswick Square, near to the Sheepshanks’ London home.^* The popular reputation of dancers in the nineteenth century set them very low in the moral order; they were ranked beneath even actresses, and set almost on a par with prostitutes. This picture, however, was certainly a distortion. Although ‘respectability’ was a rather fluid concept during the early Victorian age, most ballet girls actually came from modestly ‘respectable’ homes, and lived – as far as can be ascertained – modestly ‘respectable’ lives.¹² Eleanor Henry’s position seems to confirm this point. For a start she was married. Her husband was a Mr James Henry. He listed his profession as ‘Solicitor’, although he does not appear in the law lists of the period and may well have been little more than a lawyer’s clerk.¹³ At the beginning of the 1830s they were living together in the house of a Mrs Henry (perhaps James’s mother).¹⁴ Despite this unpropitious domestic arrangement, the Revd Richard Sheepshanks succeeded not only in forming an attachment with Eleanor but also in fathering a child on her. A daughter was born on 19 August 1830.¹⁵

Mr Henry’s attitude to, or indeed knowledge of, his wife’s liaison is unknown. He did, however, give his surname and his blessing to the infant. It was he, rather than Richard Sheepshanks, who attended the christening at St Pancras Parish Church and who had himself listed as the child’s legal father. The little girl was baptized Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry. The last Christian name is something of a mystery, as the Henrys did not, as far as records show, belong to the Moravian sect.¹⁶

The young Eleanor Louisa – or Nelly – was brought up in the Henry household. If Richard Sheepshanks provided some assistance he did so covertly. Nevertheless, his interest in his natural daughter does seem to have been real and, given the proximity of Woburn Place to Henrietta Street, he must have had opportunities for observing her. Almost nothing is known of Nelly Henry’s childhood, except that it was not happy. The demands of her mother’s stage work meant that she was often neglected. She did, however, show an early love for music. Her mother sang to her, and the songs of the passing street performers also caught her ear, making a lasting impression on her memory and her imagination.¹⁷

The Henrys moved from Henrietta Street in 1833. They disappear from view but almost certainly remained in London, for, at some moment later in the decade, Eleanor broke with her husband and began a relationship with Samuel Buchanan Green, a dancing master from Highgate. She took her daughter with her and, though there is no evidence to suggest that she married Mr Green, she took his name and the young Nelly came to regard Mr Green as her ‘step-father’.¹⁸ In November 1838, when Eleanor gave birth to a son, christened Alfred, she listed her name on the birth certificate as ‘Green, late Henry’.¹⁹ In 1840, the Greens established a dancing school in connection with the Princess Theatre in Oxford Street. The teaching studio was immediately behind the theatre at 36 Castle Street and the family lived above it – an arrangement that can only have increased the 10-year-old Nelly’s love of music.²⁰

Perhaps the Revd Richard Sheepshanks disapproved of these new domestic conditions, or maybe the arrival of young Alfred placed a strain on the resources of the Green household; perhaps the Sheepshanks’ own plans to move out of London precipitated the change. Whatever the reason, at about this time Richard offered to take his natural daughter under his own care, to remove her from the stage-door world of Castle Street, to arrange for her schooling, and to provide in some as yet unspecified measure for her future. The offer was accepted and, at the beginning of the 1840s, the old loosely fixed order was broken up.²¹

Nelly was sent over the Channel to a small boarding school at Neuville-lès-Dieppe. Richard Sheepshanks and his sister closed up Woburn Place and moved to a house on the outskirts of Reading, where once again they built a little observatory in the garden. The Greens continued with their school at Castle Street. And according to family tradition Mrs ‘Green, late Henry’ also performed on the stage of the Princess Theatre.²² It is doubtful that she ever saw her daughter again. She might have encountered Richard Sheepshanks occasionally. He returned often to London during the first years of the new decade. He was engaged in the great work of his later life: the establishment of a new set of standard weights and measures, the former one having been destroyed in the fire that swept through the Palace of Westminster in 1832. In a well-insulated subterranean laboratory in the cellars of Somerset House, he carried out tens of thousands of micro-measurements in order to determine the standard yard.²³ It was a staggering exercise of both patience and artistry. He had, it was recognized, ‘an extraordinarily skilful eye with the micrometer’ and his comparisons ‘were so far superior to those of all preceding experimenters … as to defy all competition on grounds of accuracy’.²⁴

In 1850, Eleanor and Samuel Green vanish from the London Directories. According to the family tradition preserved by Nelly, they emigrated to Australia, where Mrs Green took to drink.²⁵ It has been supposed that Richard Sheepshanks arranged, if he did not insist upon, this removal, but there is no evidence to support such a theory. Nevertheless, the notion of a close relative disappearing to the Antipodes never to be heard of again was powerful in its suggestion. It became one of the defining elements in young Nelly Henry’s personal story. And it was a story that in time she would communicate to her own children, thrilling them with its mingled sense of mystery and loss. The actual moment of Eleanor Green’s departure from England, however, probably passed unknown across the Channel by her daughter.²⁶

Dieppe in the 1840s already had an established expatriate colony. Living was cheap there compared to England. The completion of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the introduction of steam packet-boats meant that it took a mere eleven hours to travel from London to the French port. Mrs Maria Slee’s school, set – across the harbour from the old town – on the still verdant slopes of Neuville, was one of several educational establishments in the area catering for English children:²⁷ the bracing sea air was considered to be beneficial to youth.²⁸ Mrs Slee’s was a happy place, and it offered Nelly the structure and companionship that had been lacking from the lonely and bohemian years of her childhood, and also the security of real affection.

She boarded there not only during the terms but also in the holidays, growing in time to be less a pupil than a part of the family. Mrs Slee was almost a second mother to Nelly; her daughters ‘became much attached’ to their young English charge, and she to them.²⁹ It was during these years that Dieppe developed, for Nelly, into a charmed place – the place where ‘she was happy and well for the first time’.³⁰

She stayed at the school until she was almost eighteen, becoming strong, handsome and accomplished. She learnt to speak French ‘with a good accent at least’.³¹ Her status and her future prospects, however, remained a mystery to her. She was aware that she was under the protection of a distinguished guardian – a Fellow of the Royal Society – but, although they corresponded, it seems that they did not meet. She did not learn the identity of her protector until 1848, when she was eighteen.³² Richard Sheepshanks was impressed with the progress made by his daughter, and he was anxious that it should continue. But perhaps not at Dieppe. The year 1848 was one of turmoil and revolution throughout Europe. The French once again overthrew their monarch, the unfortunate Louis Philippe. He fled to England and many English residents in France made the same trip. Anti-British sentiment was rife. Richard took the precaution of arranging for Nelly to leave Dieppe to finish her education in the pretty little Baltic town of Altona near the mouth of the river Elbe. Altona was nominally a Danish town, part of the Danish-controlled duchy of Holstein. But it was just across the river from Hamburg and had strong links with the German states.

Richard Sheepshanks knew the town well because it had a famous observatory, renowned for producing the clearest and most accurate astronomical tables. For many years it had been under the directorship of his close friend, Heinrich Schumacher. Schumacher was an astronomer of international standing, a member of the Royal Society in London, and the editor of Astronomische Nachrichten, the principal journal in the field.³³ And it was with Professor Schumacher and his family that Nelly was sent to stay. The events of 1848 had not been without their effect on the Schumachers. Hostilities had also erupted between Denmark and Prussia over the disputed territory of Holstein, and while the conflict continued the professor’s salary was not paid. Richard Sheepshanks was happy to think that Nelly’s board-and-lodging expenses would contribute to the family coffers. The professor undertook to see to her education, while his wife, his daughter, and the widow of his son, promised to make her welcome.³⁴

Initially, Nelly’s position in the household was slightly ambiguous. Richard had intimated to Professor Schumacher that, although Nelly was his ‘ward’, she would ‘not improbably’ have to make her own way in the world – perhaps as a governess, that established refuge for portionless but educated Victorian girls.³⁵ Certainly Richard Sheepshanks’ hopes for his ward’s education suggested such a path. He wanted her to study music and drawing, as well as learning German and mathematics and perhaps even some Latin. But he repeatedly stressed that ‘Nelly’ was to be shown no special consideration,³⁶ and that if she could be made use of ‘as nurse, amanuensis, housemaid, or [in] any other capacity’ it would be ‘the best education she could have’.³⁷

Such promptings were unnecessary. Nelly had a generous and helpful disposition. She speedily endeared herself to the Schumachers through her acts of kindness and her expressions of gratitude. She also proved a ready pupil. She learnt, as she put it, ‘to sing very well and to paint very badly. She devoted herself to embroidery and fine sewing. She revealed a gift for languages, learning to speak German ‘like a native’.³⁸ She also picked up Italian and Danish, though it is not known whether Professor Schumacher found time to teach her any Latin. (He had replied facetiously to Richard Sheepshanks’ suggestion that he might give Nelly some classical education with the French verse: ‘Soleil qui luit le matin,/Enfant qui boit du vin,/Femme qui sait le Latin/Ne viennent jamais a bonne fin.’^*39)

The Revd Richard Sheepshanks corresponded regularly with both Nelly and Professor Schumacher and was encouraged by news of her progress. He was able to confirm this good impression when he visited Altona in October 1849. Over the previous year his plans for his ward’s future seem to have grown and developed. And it was perhaps during, or immediately after, this visit that he revealed to Nelly his true position and declared his intention of formally recognizing her as his child. She preserved always, as the one scrap of writing in his hand, a passage from the letter in which he revealed to her his fatherhood: ‘Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you.’⁴⁰ The scrap is undated, but there is a detectable shift in Richard’s attitude to Nelly after that October; references to her are more open and more openly affectionate; and his letters end with expressions of ‘best love’.⁴¹

If Nelly’s knowledge of modern languages grew chez Schumacher so did her sense of fun and her sense of life’s possibilities. It was a convivial household in a convivial town, and she was surrounded by people of her own age. Altona had a sizeable English population and Nelly formed several long-lasting friendships. There were frequent picnics, concerts, operas, even balls. She made excursions into Italy and Austria.⁴² This round of diversion was interrupted at the end of 1850 by Professor Schumacher’s sudden illness and scarcely less sudden death.⁴³ Nelly, however, had become part of the family by this stage. There was no suggestion that she should leave. She stayed on in the Schumacher household, a companion to the grieving family.

Perhaps it was this family tragedy that introduced her to Professor Schumacher’s son, Johannes.⁴⁴ He was the artistic member of the family and had been away, studying painting in Rome. He immediately established a rapport with the family’s English houseguest, a rapport that deepened the following summer when Nelly nursed him through a bout of illness. She shared his love of Nature, and his enjoyment of climbing mountains. He admired her singing.⁴⁵ In tandem with his friendship for Nelly, Johannes also developed a close tie with her guardian. Missing his own father, he took to writing to Richard Sheepshanks, seeking his advice, his encouragement and assistance. He even visited him in London in the autumn of 1852. Early in the following year, Johannes wrote from Italy declaring that he planned to leave Rome to continue his studies in Paris. For a painter, he declared, Paris was the place to learn.⁴⁶

It was the common cry across the art schools of Europe at the time. Italy might boast the treasures of antiquity and the Renaissance, and the great German academies at Munich, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Dresden could offer a thorough practical training; but the French capital had the glamour of innovation and even revolt. It was there that the new spirit of ‘Realism’ was asserting itself with most force: at the Salon of 1850, Gustave Courbet had struck a new note with his monumental canvas The Stonebreakers. The depiction of the contemporary working man on the heroic scale of antiquity caused a sensation that others were keen to experience and to echo. Students gravitated to Paris from all over Europe and America, to throng the ateliers of Troyan, Gleyre, Couture, and Lecoq de Boisbaudran, hangar-like studios bristling with easels, plaster-casts and ambitions. Johannes Schumacher was not the only son of Altona to be drawn to Paris. He found several others already there. Amongst his confrères was an earnest young art student called Oswald Adalbert Sickert.

Oswald Sickert belonged to Altona’s artistic elite. His father, the dashing fair-haired, blond-bearded Johann Jürgen Sickert, was a pillar of the cultural community: an artist, wit, and dandy who – despite his Nordic colouring – was known to at least some of his friends by the Italianate nickname, ‘Sickarto’.⁴⁷ The son of a long line of Flensborg fishermen, he had trained as a ‘decorative painter’ and was – at least according to his grandson – for a while the ‘head of a firm of decorators who were employed in the royal palaces of Christian VIII of Denmark’.⁴⁸ He became, in time, an accomplished landscape painter, and after moving to Altona in the late 1820s was a leading member of the town’s exhibiting society. He showed there regularly, and also at the neighbouring Hamburg Kunstverein.⁴⁹ He was interested in technical innovations and was a pioneer of both lithography and photography. In 1850 the local directories list his address – at 34 Blücherstrasse – as a ‘studio of Daguerreotype’.^*50

Nevertheless, he did not abandon his first calling. He continued to undertake decorative commissions: the museum in the town still contains a painted ‘overdoor’ by him of a woman with flowers. In 1855 – at the request of the municipality – he drew up a scheme for providing art training for the town’s artisans through ‘Sunday Continuation classes’. In it he emphasized the practical benefits and applications of art, insisting on a thorough grounding in geometry and perspective. He considered that it would be ‘of more use to a carpenter, a turner or a smith, if his lessons enable him to draw a vase or an ornament correctly, than if his schooling results in nothing more than the adornment of his bedroom with a few trophies’.⁵¹ But if Johann Jürgen thought that art could be useful he also believed that the artist’s life should be fun. He was a great promoter of artistic conviviality – a composer of drinking songs and comic verses, and a leading light in the Altona dining society known as the ‘Namenlosen’ or the ‘Unnamed’, all the members of which were designated only by numbers.⁵²

Having been widowed in 1838 (when Oswald was only ten), Johann Jürgen seems to have done everything to encourage his only child’s artistic career. The young Oswald Adalbert showed precocious ability. In 1844, at the age of sixteen, he won a travelling scholarship to Copenhagen to study at the art academy. Once there, he revealed an independent spirit, abandoning the school’s classes after his first term and taking private tuition in ‘perspective drawing’ from the foremost Danish painter of the day, C. W. Eckersberg. He then devoted himself to working in the cast gallery for the whole of the following year. In 1846 he abandoned Denmark for the altogether more prestigious Academy at Munich.⁵³

Oswald Sickert stayed in the Bavarian capital for the next six years, submitting himself to the rigours of the Germanic training system. He was supported by his father, who visited him on at least one occasion and encouraged him with regular letters. Each epistle ended, ‘somewhat … to his son’s irritation’, with the imprecation – the distilled essence of old Johann Jürgen Sickert’s artistic wisdom – ‘male gut und schnell’ (paint well – paint quickly).⁵⁴ But Munich for all its virtues and opportunities had one great limitation: it was not Paris. The main drama, it was felt, was happening elsewhere. The students of Munich were alive to the new currents in French art; and in 1851 they even got a chance to view some of Courbet’s work at first hand when he exhibited in Munich, and perhaps even visited the city.⁵⁵ Oswald Sickert and his companions soon came to idolize this new master.⁵⁶ And the impact of his work prompted many of them to move to the French capital. In 1852 Oswald Sickert joined the exodus, enrolling at the Parisian teaching-studio of Thomas Couture.⁵⁷

Couture was, and remains, famous for his depictions of Classical Rome. His monumental canvas, Romans of the Decadence, was the cynosure of the 1847 Salon and was bought by the Louvre. But despite his antique themes, he allied himself closely to the contemporary strains of artistic Realism. His depiction of the dissolute Romans had been intended – and taken – as a comment on the corruption of France under Louis Philippe’s rule. He retained a reputation as a radical and independent spirit and his studio was regarded as one of the most exciting in Paris. It attracted students from all over Europe, and from America too. They found Couture’s regime both liberating and challenging. His manner had a bracing informality, very different from that of other teachers. He startled more than one student with such direct criticisms as, ‘That’s horrid! If you can’t do better than that you had better stop!’⁵⁸

Although he worked within the framework of tradition – the ‘good tradition’ of la bonne peinture that Sickert later described as being ‘sedulously nursed’ in that Paris of the 1850s – Couture was always open to the possibilities of new techniques and procedures.⁵⁹ To young artists like Oswald Sickert who arrived from the rigorously exacting art academies of Germany, such an approach was electrifying. One young artist who came to Paris from Düsseldorf considered Couture’s teaching ‘a sublime reaction from the dry-as-dust German painting then in vogue’.⁶⁰ Another thanked Couture for freeing him from ‘the niggling technique of the Germans’ as well as opening up his compositions to a much ‘broader vision & conception’.⁶¹ It was Paris that liberated Oswald Sickert. And although he was there a relatively short time (barely a year) it was, for him, a defining artistic experience: he came to regard himself as ‘more an antique Parisian than a Dane’ – or, indeed, a Bavarian.⁶²

But of course, as in most educational establishments, it was the other students – and the place itself – that provided the real education. Oswald Sickert found himself in an exciting milieu. In Paris he had the chance to see more of Courbet’s pictures.⁶³ He travelled in France, and discovered Dieppe as a sketching ground.⁶⁴ He mixed with art students not only from Couture’s atelier but from the other studios as well. There was a strong Munich contingent, including Wilhelm Füssli, Moritz Delft and Cesar Willich, as well as others from Altona, including – from 1853 – Johannes Schumacher.⁶⁵

It was Schumacher who, on one of their return visits to Altona, introduced the 24-year-old Oswald Sickert to the family houseguest, Eleanor Henry.⁶⁶ The Eleanor he met was an accomplished young woman of twenty-two, vivacious, attractive, and with beautiful fair hair. Oswald Sickert, for his part, was touched with the metropolitan glamour of Paris. He had a fine beard and, despite a retiring manner, seems to have been considered rather a dashing figure by the young ladies of Altona. (Preserved amongst his papers is one letter from an admirer – not Eleanor Henry – who addressed him with more poetic ardour than geo-political exactness as ‘Dear German Lord Byron’.⁶⁷) It was not, however, his romantic looks, nor even his fledgling artistic reputation, that seems to have drawn Eleanor Henry to him. It was music. They shared a common passion. Oswald Sickert played the piano with real sensitivity and skill. According to one exacting critic, his ‘technique was faulty, but his phrasing was musicianly, and … for passion and for singing quality in cantabile passages he excelled many public performers’. He had a strong sense of rhythm and was a ‘brilliant’ sight-reader.⁶⁸ Eleanor, the dancer’s daughter, had her own sense of rhythm and allied it to a beautiful singing voice. Their romance flourished to an accompaniment of Schubert lieder.

He preferred the countryside around the town, and came to know it well. From the moment that the May-fest signalled the beginning of the summer, Munichers would flock to leave the city. The Sickerts joined this annual exodus, passing a month or two in the Bavarian countryside, lodging with peasants’ families, or staying at country inns. They would visit the little villages dotting the shore of the nearby Starnbergersee – the magnificent lake some sixteen miles long just south of Munich. Or they might venture further afield to other lakes in the Bavarian Tyrol – to the wooded shores of the Chiemsee or to the Staffelsee. In an alfresco variation of their Munich life, Oswald would sketch and paint, while Eleanor would look after the children. In the evening they would all gather in the biergarten of the inn.¹³²

There were also happy outdoor days spent with the family of the Revd Rodney Fowler, the sometime rector of Broadway in Worcestershire, who became the English chaplain at Munich in 1866. He and his wife, arriving with two daughters, aged five and two, had been at once drawn into the Sickerts’ circle.¹³³ The Sickerts also paid visits to Laufzorn, the Rankes’ country house. The place, a former hunting lodge of the kings of Bavaria, was supposedly haunted, which may have added to the excitement of the visits.¹³⁴ But the main pleasure for the children was in playing in the huge echoing banqueting room, which contained an improvised swing – a long plank on which several children could sit astride while it was swung, fearfully, lengthways. As Helena recalled, ‘Every child had to cling tightly to the one in front and the exercise was performed to a chorus of “Hutsche-Kutscher-Genung!” the last word being shouted as loud and as long as possible.’ There was also a big hay barn where the children could jump from the rafters into the hay below.¹³⁵

Walter delighted in such games and in such company. He was extremely sociable and made friends easily.¹³⁶ Surrounded by boys at home, he seems to have enjoyed being surrounded by girls elsewhere. At the age of six he had managed to become engaged both to one of Dr Ranke’s daughters and to the eldest of Mr Fowler’s girls. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he remarked, when looking back on the arrangement, ‘that there was any inconsistency.’ It was an attitude of mind that he preserved in his relations with the female sex throughout his life.¹³⁷

The Bavarian summers were months of almost idyllic pleasure for the children. It was in the Starnbergersee that Walter discovered the delights of swimming, and there, too, that he learnt to fish.¹³⁸ Initially, he had merely tied a piece of bread to a length of string and watched the fishes nibble, but Mr Fowler, steeped in the sporting traditions of the Anglican clergy, showed him – much to Eleanor’s dismay – how to bait a hook. Death, however, seems to have intrigued Walter. One holiday game involved the construction of a miniature cemetery from pebbles and moss and twigs.¹³⁹ In Walter’s memory these summers took on the hues of a golden age. He would look back to them as a time of peace, calm, and certainty. ‘When I used to play by mill streams in Bavaria [and] listened to my mother sing the Schoener Muller of Schubert,’ he recalled, ‘I thought it would always be like that.’

The extraordinary beauty of the Bavarian countryside in early summer – the greenness of the foliage, the clearness of the light, the profusion of flowers – made a profound and lasting impression on all the Sickert children. Walter, though he became the great artist of urban life and urban architecture, retained always a flickering sense that ‘woods & lakes & brooks’ were ‘the nicest things in the world’.¹⁴⁰ It was the quality of light that made them special: the fall of broken sunshine through the overarching canopy of leaves. ‘I think,’ he declared, ‘the loveliest thing in Nature is a sous-bois.’¹⁴¹ Even as a child he sought to express his admiration in art. From the age of five he wanted to paint such verdant, sun-dappled scenes. It became one of the recurrent desires of his working life – recurrent, in part, because it was never achieved.¹⁴²

In all the Sickert children’s games and activities Walter took the lead. Although Mrs Sickert maintained a clear structure of kindly authority, she rarely attempted any interference between her offspring, and would not countenance ‘tale bearing’. It was her principle that they should all learn to live together.¹⁴³ This was a situation that rather suited Walter, who was ‘not only the eldest, but by far the cleverest’, and the most energetic of the siblings.¹⁴⁴ Robert was a fretful child, Bernhard a fractious one, and Helena too young to exert her own considerable powers.¹⁴⁵ From the outset, Walter imposed his will upon them all, getting his own way either by force of character or by guile – though he was not above climbing out of his cot in the nursery to pull his sister’s hair if he felt the occasion warranted.¹⁴⁶ But, as Helena admitted, even at this young age ‘he was able to infuse so much charm into life’, and to make ‘our pursuits so interesting’, that ‘we were generally his willing slaves’.¹⁴⁷ It became one of Mrs Sickert’s recurrent complaints that none of the siblings was able to ‘resist’ Walter, an indication – as Helena noted – that not all his activities were agreeable to authority. Walter, however, was a fickle leader, with no sense of responsibility to his followers. His restless intelligence needed the stimulation of constant change. For his siblings, the ‘tragedy’ came – and came frequently – when ‘the magician suddenly took flight to some other adventure and the one which had seemed so entrancing, while [Walter] led it, turned to folly in the grey morning after’.¹⁴⁸

From a very young age Walter was regarded as being separate from and above his younger brothers. The phrase ‘Walter and the boys’ was a common and early family coinage.¹⁴⁹ He enjoyed a privileged position as the eldest child. In the evenings he alone was allowed to sit up with his parents, not to supper, but at the supper table.¹⁵⁰ Oswald Sickert’s long working hours and occasional absences encouraged Walter to develop a sense almost of responsibility towards his mother. In later years he would describe how, during his Munich childhood, he was ‘for many years’ her ‘only rational companion’.¹⁵¹ He alone amongst his siblings established a bond with his father. The other children were slightly frightened of ‘Papa’. It seemed that he never spoke to them unless it was to give an order or to make some disparaging comment.¹⁵² But then he did not speak very much to anyone. He was extremely taciturn and reserved by nature.¹⁵³ Walter, however, he did talk to – after his own fashion. The trip to London had fostered relations between them. Walter always held dear the memory of his father’s kindly face looking down at him as he sank under the anaesthetic before the operation – a perhaps rare intimation of tenderness from his diffident parent.¹⁵⁴ It was with Walter that Oswald Sickert took his daily walk on the Theresienwiese.¹⁵⁵ And he impressed his son with his few words. He had, as Walter recorded, ‘a wide critical comprehension’. And though he was apt to judge himself as ‘coldly as he did everything else’, there seems to have been an edge of wit to his verdicts.¹⁵⁶ Many years later, when reading Heine, Sickert was struck by the similarities between the poet’s self-deflating irony and his father’s own ‘expressions & attitude of spirit’. They came, he noted, from the same northern, Baltic world.¹⁵⁷

Even as a child, Walter was interested in his father’s work – his paintings and, more particularly, his drawings. The arrival at 4 Kleestrasse of the Fliegende Blätter on Thursday evenings at supper time was ‘an event’ in Walter’s week, and not merely because he was presented with the paper wrapper to wear as a cap. He was interested to hear his father’s comments on the reproduction of the wood engravings. And he liked to look at the pictures. Many of the images lived with him throughout his life.^* And although it was perhaps the comedy of the situations depicted that provided the initial attraction, he also imbibed an understanding of technique and an appreciation of how scenes of everyday life could be rendered in art. The quality of work in the paper was extremely high and the variety instructive. When he came to review the artistic masters of his Munich childhood Sickert singled out the work of Wilhelm Diez, Wilhelm Busch, and particularly Adolf Oberlander, whom he praised for his ‘frankness’ and his genius for rendering scenes ‘in terms of limpid light, and shade’.¹⁵⁸ The set of bound copies of the Fliegende Blätter became part of the Sickert family library and Walter had plenty of opportunities to refresh his memory and refine his knowledge of its artists, but the foundation of his appreciation and understanding was laid in his early childhood.¹⁵⁹

During the summer of 1866 the anxieties that Oswald and Eleanor had felt about the political situation in Europe were confirmed. The Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, having carefully prepared the ground, engineered a dispute with Austria as a pretext for laying claim to Holstein. In what became known as the Seven Weeks War, the Prussians decisively defeated their former allies and their associates (nine German states, including Bavaria, had sided with the Austrians). In August, a peace treaty was signed at Prague giving Prussia full control of both Schleswig and Holstein. A new German constitution was established, and it was decreed that all citizens of Schleswig-Holstein would become naturalized Prussians in October of the following year. Oswald Sickert was concerned at the effect this might have on his young family. He did not wish his sons to be liable at some future date to conscription into the Prussian army (and he was anxious, too, that they should not become what he called ‘Beer-swilling Bavarians’).¹⁶⁰ The idea of moving to England took serious hold. It was, however, an operation that required some planning.

Walter, in the meantime, began attending a local school, and his brothers soon followed him. It was a huge, impersonal place. Each class had between fifty and eighty boys, and pupils were drawn from all backgrounds. Robert found the noise and the number of boys altogether too much, but Walter remained unfazed. He got on ‘very nicely’, his mother reported: ‘He does not learn much, they do nothing but German & reckoning and these public schools are so large that the bright ones always have to keep pace with the slow ones.’¹⁶¹ Walter, in his mother’s informed – if not unbiased – opinion, was very definitely one of ‘the bright ones’.

By November 1867 the Sickerts’ plans for moving to England were well advanced. Anne Sheepshanks had given her blessing to the scheme. The Sickerts left Munich the following spring. Walter does not appear to have considered it a deracination. Although in the anti-German decades of the twentieth century he always enjoyed the shock that could be produced by announcing to an English audience that he was a ‘Münchener Kind’l’, he never thought of himself as a German or a Bavarian.¹⁶² He retained a passing enjoyment of German literature and relish for the tricks of the German language.¹⁶³ But these were surface pleasures; they left very little mark on his character. Duncan Grant, who came to know Sickert well, considered that there was ‘very little of the German’ in his make-up.¹⁶⁴ Sickert himself admitted only to having ‘a certain German quality, which is called in German sächlich – devoted to things, ideas, etc. – to the possible disadvantage of people’, a quality by which he excused his often disparaging critical comments upon the work of his friends.¹⁶⁵ But while he certainly did possess this cool, critical, northern trait, he was more likely to have inherited it from his father than to have imbibed it amidst the hurly-burly of the Munich Volksschule.

The Sickerts, on leaving Munich, did not go at once to England. They passed a long summer at Dieppe. It was a happy interlude. Walter was even enrolled briefly at the Collège du Dieppe.¹⁶⁶ He exchanged German for French. If he did not have an ear for music he had one for languages. Learning by mimicry rather than book study, his accent ran ahead of his understanding. He would pick up whole passages of French speech and recite them perfectly, convincing Frenchmen that he was a young compatriot. The disadvantage of this trick only came when they answered him and he was unable either to understand or to reply.¹⁶⁷ The experience of being lost for words was a new one to him.

^* It became the nucleus of the V&A picture collection.

^* The whole area has since been remodelled: the west side of the square has been replaced by the Brunswick Centre, a 1960s shopping and housing development.

^* ‘A sun that shines in the morning,/A child that drinks wine,/A woman who knows Latin/Never come to a good end.’

^* Sickert preserved a daguerreotype of his grandfather, sitting very still in a dressing-gown and a smoking-cap ‘calculated to turn his pious grandson green with envy’. ‘From the Life’, Morning Post (18 May 1925).

^* Though he may not have known it, he too had been born out of wedlock. His parents married in June 1828, four months after his birth.

^* On the baptismal register, Bernard’s name is spelled ‘Bernhart’, though he never seems to have used this form. Robert was given the second name ‘Oswald’, like his father.

^* ‘Milk and butter are in a state of barbarism,’ reported the travel writer Edward Wilberforce. The butter was often rancid. As to the difference between milk and cream in Munich, ‘a long experience has shown me that cream is milk with water put in it, while milk is water with milk put in it’.

^* The trust was set up on 29 June, between Mr and Mrs Sickert, Anne Sheepshanks, and three trustees, Augustus de Morgan, William Sharp, and George Campbell de Morgan (a copy is in the Sutton papers at GUL).

^* ‘I remember an illustration in the Fliegende Blätter in the early sixties in which was depicted a little girl guiding her blind grandmother. Finding the road rather even, and therefore tedious, the child from time to time feigned an obstacle, a brick or stone, and said, “Granny, jump,” which the old lady obediently did. When someone remonstrated with the child, she answered, “My grandmother is mine; I may do what I choose with her.”’ ‘The Polish Rider’, New Age (23 June 1910).