THE ART OF WALTER SICKERT
Walter Richard Sickert was born in Munich on 31 May 1860 to an English mother, Eleanor, and a Danish father.3. The father, Oswald Sickert, was an artist
employed in Germany as an illustrator for a comic journal. In 1868 the family emigrated to England; first to Bradford and then the following year to London.
Sickert left school at the age of 18. Unable to pay for university and having drawn all his life, he wished to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an artist. Discouraged from this by his father, he turned instead to the stage where from the years 1879 to 1880 he found some success, (at times using the pseudonym Mr. Nemo), with small parts under the direction of Henry Irving and other well-known actors. It was in May of 1879 that Sickert first met the American artist James McNeil Whistler, a meeting that would change his life.
Turning full time to painting from acting, Sickert first exhibited his work at the Fine Art Society in London in 1881. In October of that year he signed up for classes at both the Slade School and Heathely’s School of Art in London. In 1882 Sickert dropped out of these schools and at the invitation of Whistler became his pupil and studio assistant.
It was from Whistler that Sickert learned to paint alla prima, which is to say, from nature, and quickly, pushing wet paint around a canvas in order to capture a scene or setting in a single sitting. Although Sickert was uncomfortable with this method, he did learn to paint details using only a few strokes of the brush. Whistler also taught Sickert his Symbolist esthetic which created an "evocation of mystery and indeterminancy which was to last, in one form or another, throughout his career."4. These elements, combined with his work as a tonal painter (one who studies and paints the contrasts of light and dark), united to create the aspects of Sickert’s work that make some of his subjects faces appear to be mutilated.
It is this aspect of Sickert’s work that has become the Rorschach test of Ripperology. Meaning is divined from the indistinct features of Sickert’s subjects, and we are told to look at a painting and describe which Ripper victim we see. With Sickert, however, it is very hard to tell what might be shadow and what might be blood. Like the Rorschach test, you see what you want to see.
In April of 1883, Sickert was entrusted with taking Whistler's Portrait of the Artist's Mother to Paris, where it was to be shown. Armed with letters of introduction to Manet and Degas, Sickert journeyed to the French capital, where he found Manet too ill to see him. Degas received the young painter, however, and they started a friendship which lasted until Degas' death in 1917.
Sickert's early work was thus influenced by both Whistler and Degas, and it was from the French impressionist that he learned to make many sketches, to set a scene first on paper before transferring his ideas to the canvas in the studio. This long and laborious process, basically the traditional method of oil painting, suited Sickert’s temperament much more than Whistler’s quick, almost instant paintings. It was also Degas’ influence that started Sickert painting the London music halls and their audiences. Degas painted "the everyday, the lives and experiences of the people of Paris",5 and this concept of the "frank depiction of the world around him"6 which Sickert adopted as his own, began both his reputation as "the outstanding figure of his time in British art",7 as well as the reputation of someone who delved into the seamier side of life.
In 1885 he married Ellen Cobden, the daughter of a Liberal politician and twelve years his senior. The couple visited the Netherlands and Munich before spending the summer in Dieppe, as he had for many summers before and as he would do for many years to come. Sickert had been fluent in French from a young age and he felt that although he lived in Britain, France was his spiritual home. On their return from France he and Ellen moved into 54 Broadhurst Gardens, South Hampstead where Sickert used the top floor as his studio.
This fact is important when it becomes clear that Sickert had no other studio in London after his 1885 marriage for the rest of the 1880's. Certainly no studio in Cleveland Street - as Joseph Gorman Sickert has said he had - and also not the three "secret"studios in Whitechapel as both Stephen Knight and Patricia Cornwell have claimed. The three Whitechapel studios are apparently a confusion with the three studios Sickert had in North London in 1905 at 8 Fitzroy Street, 76 Charlotte Street 8 and his rooms at 6 Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, where the landlady had told him the tale of a veterinary student whom she claimed was the Ripper.
Over the next few years, Sickert exhibited his works in several exhibitions and also taught art at a school he opened in London under Whistler's patronage. By 1896 he was separated from his wife, their relationship strained by his constant infidelities and "chronic independence".9 The couple divorced in 1899, with Sickert losing the financial security of his wife’s fortune. Sickert's friendship with Whistler had also been strained, and finally ended in 1897 after a libel suit in which Sickert was one of the defendants and Whistler appeared as a witness for the prosecution. It was soon after this point, when Sickert was finally gaining a solid reputation in London, that he closed his studio, packed his belongings and moved to Dieppe in the Autumn of 1898. In 1899 Sickert moved to Neuville, just outside of Dieppe, and lived with Mme. Augustine Villain, a fish merchant, and her children. Mme. Villain’s son, Maurice, was almost certainly Sickert’s and thus Patricia Cornwell’s theory of Sickert’s sterility is brought into question.
Sickert did not return to London until February 1905 when he acquired his studios in Fitzroy and Charlotte Streets. He then journeyed back to France, where he exhibited in Paris, and returned to live permanently in London later that same year.10
Back in London, Sickert’s work consisted almost entirely of music hall scenes and the faded life he saw around him in Camden Town. "He revelled in the faded splendours of dingy lodging-rooms in Camden Town."11 As we shall see, this was the period when virtually all of the paintings identified as being of Whitechapel victims were done. He taught at the Westminster Institute, started a school for etching, and held shows in both London and Paris.
In September 1907, a part-time prostitute named Emily Elizabeth Dimmock, also known as Phyllis, was found murdered in her bed at 29 St Paul’s Road, Camden Town. Known in the press as the “Camden Town Murder,” Sickert began to title several drawings, sketches and paintings with this descriptor. Joseph Gorman Sickert has made the claim that these works actually represent Mary Kelly.
In 1911 Sickert founded the Camden Town Group, which was later renamed the London Group, and also married Christine Angus, a student of his and seventeen years his junior. In October of 1920, Christine died. Sickert’s behaviour at Christine’s graveside, when he supposedly opened the urn containing her ashes and flung some of the ash at the mourners, is seen by Patricia Cornwell as a sign of Sickert’s psychopathy, but considering his behaviour over the next several years, it was more likely a display of his intense grief. Sickert seems to have suffered a breakdown after his wife’s death and his behavior became more erratic and eccentric as time passed. The death of his mother in February 1922 added to his depression and morbid imagination.
Sickert’s life stabilized in June of 1926 when he married long time friend Thérèse Lessore who would remain his companion and guardian for the rest of his life.12 Unfortunately, Sickert suffered some debilitating illness, possibly a stroke, only months after his wedding. It would take the better part of the year for him to recover.
In 1924 Sickert became an associate member of the Royal Academy, becoming an academician a decade later. But shortly afterwards he resigned in protest against attacks on the works of his friend Jacob Epstein (later Sir Jacob Epstein) by the president of the Academy.
It was in his declining years that Sickert began to paint entirely from photographs. He had done this from time to time for most of his career and as a painter he never painted anything that was not in front of him, be it from life, or from sketches and drawings done earlier, or from photographs. His paintings from this period were either panned as being unartistic copies or hailed as some of his best and most interesting work.
In 1941 Sickert was honored with a one-man exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The next year he died in Bath, where he is buried, on 22 January 1942.
