Finding ‘nemo’

If your father happened to be an artist, then it is probably not surprising that he would encourage his oldest child to pursue a different (more predictably profitable?) profession. So, I can only imagine Oswald Sickert’s dismayed reaction when the first of his six children, (the unusually compliant) Walter, announced that he would be an actor instead.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), who was to become one of the most influential British artists of the early 20^th century, took to the stage in his late teens under the name ‘Mr Nemo’ (Latin for ‘nobody’). While he had some minor roles in touring productions, ART continued to pre-occupy him and at the age of 21 years, Sickert began his art career by enrolling in a ‘general course’ at the Slade School of Fine Art – doubtless upsetting his father a second time.

But let’s backtrack briefly. Sickert was probably destined to be an exotic individual. His Danish father – who was a painter and woodcut illustrator for the comic paper ‘Fliegende Blätter‘ – had married an Anglo-Irish woman – the illegitimate daughter of a dancer and astronomer, and Walter entered the world in Munich. Initially living in Germany, the family moved to England after the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein when Walter was 8 years of age. Educated at a range of schools (including University College School and King’s College School) in London, Walter was tri-lingual and an eccentric.

Sickert’s family were immersed in the world of art and culture so it is not at all surprising that young Walter would want to pursue art. In 1882, Sickert abandoned the stage and arranged to be an apprentice to James Abbot McNeill Whistler who advised Sickert to leave the Slade School. Although primarily a lickspittle and studio assistant for Whistler, Sickert learned a considerable amount about painting and printmaking techniques, which he used to make early works in the ‘style of Whistler’.

In 1883, Sickert couriered Whistler’s ‘Portrait of the artist’s mother’ to the Paris Salon where he met Edgar Degas who would become Sickert’s other great early influencer. With these two mentors, Sickert began painting low-toned landscapes which were well-received. By 1885, Sickert was becoming known as an artist and, on his honeymoon, he and his new wife spent time in Dieppe where they met the artist Jacques-Émile Blanche (see the post about Blanche). Sickert and Blanche became close friends and Blanche was central to connecting Sickert with Parisian dealers, obtaining commissions for him and supporting his election to the Salon d’Autonne. Blanche also subsidised Sickert’s art practice through purchasing his work – amassing a large collection of Sickert’s paintings (many of which were bequeathed with Blanche’s own works to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen).

It was during this time, and under Degas’ influence, that Sickert’s way of painting changed into something which he would develop and refine during the rest of his life. Sickert moved away from Whistler’s teaching of painting from nature with a wet-in-wet technique, to studio painting based on drawings. He joined the recently created New English Art Club and showed paintings based on the world of the British music hall – a theme which would occupy him for most of his life. These works created notoriety and controversy for their sexually provocative themes.

Over the next decade, Sickert’s subjects expanded to include portraits, urban domestic scenes and landscapes. It was difficult for Sickert to stay in any one place – home, studio, or art society – for long.  After becoming disillusioned with the New English Art Club and having been divorced by his wife on the grounds of his adultery, Sickert moved to Dieppe to live for an extended period.

Sickert once described Dieppe as his ‘goldmine’ which provided him with ‘a little decent comfort’. The focus of this drawing is a statue of Admiral Abraham Duquesne (a distinguished 17th century naval hero) which stands in the Place Nationale, Dieppe and is popularly known as ‘Le Grand Duquesne’. During Sickert’s permanent residency in the town in the years 1898–1905 the statue became one of his favourite and most frequently repeated subjects.

While in Europe, Sickert visited Venice several times between 1895 and 1904.He described his working method in Venice as striving ‘to see the thing all at once. To work open and loose, freely, with a full brush and full colour. And to understand that when, with that full colour, … the picture is done’.

One of the recurring images from his time in Venice is of La Giuseppina – a sex worker that Sickert knew well.

A chance meeting with the young artist, Spencer Gore, encouraged Sickert to return to his favourite working-class London haunts to join the new generation of progressive artists which would become the Camden Town Group in 1910. This group held three exhibitions and Sickert’s paintings of a local murder attracted the most interest. By 1914, the Camden Town Group had morphed into the London Group which no longer interested Sickert. Sickert’s best-known work, Ennui (c. 1913), which exists in five versions and an etching, depicts a disconnected couple in a dingy interior gazing abstractedly into empty space.

During World War I, Sickert was no longer able to travel to Dieppe in the summer and, as a result, he began to explore the English countryside around Devon and Brighton. These years saw Sickert working mainly in etching. Following the war, Sickert returned to Europe and settled in France with his second wife, moving back to England a couple of years after her death in 1922.

For the remaining 22 years his life, Sickert continued to paint but his subject matter was increasingly from photographs taken by his third wife, or from images in the newspapers. Not interested in high society portraits (although he did paint less formal pictures of Aubrey Beardsley, Winston Churchill, and King George V), or glamorous depictions, Sickert was focussed on the lives of everyday people struggling to get by and find simple pleasures. His art shone a bleak and muted light on the drab, dismal and disillusioned world of the Edwardian era.

There are two more curious paintings by Sickert in the NGV collection. No information is available on Irish emigrants landing at Melbourne but it was the type of image that Sickert found in the newspapers which piqued his creative interest.

The raising of Lazarus combines Sickert’s artistic and theatrical bents. In 1929, Sickert was given a large 18th century wooden artist’s model by his brother-in-law. This corpse-like object encouraged Sickert to stage the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Creating a tableau in his studio, he invited his protégée, Cicely Hey, to play the part of Martha, while Sickert mounted a step-ladder and posed for the figure of Christ. After arranging the lighting and taking multiple photographs, Sickert was able to create a ‘composite image’ which became the largest picture he ever painted (244.2cm x 91.9cm). To assist in the creation of the work, Sickert made studies – one of which is in the Art Gallery of South Australia; the other in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Universally acknowledged throughout his life as a colourful, charismatic, and fascinating eccentric – never short of an opinion – Sickert’s contribution to British cultural life was not only confined to his art. He was a significant writer, teacher, critic, commentator (including letters to the newspaper), and political force in artistic circles. Often out of step with his contemporaries (for example he did not rate the post-impressionists, or Matisse or Picasso highly) his output was overlooked after his death in 1942. However, when artists like Frank Auerbach and the Euston Road School acknowledged a debt to his skill and subject matter, he was re-examined and Sickert now has a reputation as one of the most important British artists of the early modern period.

Post Script: In recent years, Sickert gained a new notoriety when the American crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell published a book in 2002 claiming that Sickert may have been Jack the Ripper. Her assertion was based on considerable unsubstantiated circumstantial evidence – although Sickert did believe he had spent time in Jack the Ripper’s lodgings – and has since been discredited. However, it is just another element in the life of this exotic Edwardian artist and character.