Idealism (Walter Sickert)
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"Idealism" is a text by Walter Sickert.
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I cannot, unfortunately, lay my hand on a recent utterance of Rodin’s which seems to me to put idealism in its proper place. It was published in The Art News of a few weeks ago, so that most of my readers can probably refer to it, and substitute for my very lame recollection the well-chosen and weighty phrase of the master.
The drift of his definition was this. He pointed out that while work based on the study of nature had the infinite circle of nature herself as its field, what is called ideal work was limited to the miserably limited source that is to be found in the preference of a finite individual. I was endeavouring to express the same truth when I said in my article on Whistler in The Fortnightly that taste was the death of a painter. It substitutes for the wholesome diet that the whole field of nature should yield him, the ever-narrowing atrophy, the gradual starvation that must ensue when his food is limited to the consumption of his poor finite self. I cannot think of an artist who illustrated in a single life the results of these two contrasted diets as clearly as did Watts. I saw not long ago some small versions, completed studies, I imagine, for some of his allegories, and it struck me as appalling that the painter of the portraits in Holland House, of Lady Holland in a Chinese hat, of Russell Gurney, should have allowed a turgid confusion of thought to lead him into the perpetration of such senseless monstrosities.
We all have a natural timidity in speaking the truth about work which, we are loudly and frequently assured, is done with the noblest and highest motives. And the venerable veteran, whose distinguished appearance was in itself almost enough to silence criticism, promulgated pretty regularly, by the mouths of his chosen interviewers, the lofty nature of his aims. It is never a grateful task – the critic has not the beau rôle, who tackles pretensions of this kind, insidious in their insistence, and eminently sympathetic in their appeal. But sooner or later, in the interest of truth and clarity, this has to be done. Our English fault is to be too “nice.” Don’t I know the pestilent phrase, “So-and-So is always very nice about my work”? To be too “nice” is as criminal in a critic as it would be in a dentist or a surgeon. Why I, who am the mildest-mannered man alive in private life, should be called upon by fate incessantly to practise these rather brutal and disagreeable excisions I don’t know. I believe that I am of service to the artists of my generation, and the next, by trying to put into words observations, and conclusions that are very serious realities to us.
To what, then, does it seem to me that the sentimental abandonment of nature led Mr. Watts in the studies I am speaking of? To the negation of all the things that are of the essence of painting and draughtsmanship. Contour is abandoned; light and shade exist no more. The forms are epicene; colour non-existent. It lingers only as a symbol – as much local colour as can be expressed by words. The sexes are distinguished solely by the fact that the male is painted mahogany, and the female the colour of a candle. They flop and they float, and there are laurel leaves, I think, and a raw light for the sky.
What has been written of the imaginative painting of the great masters has naturally been mostly written by writers. So that while volumes are filled with explanations of the sublimity and the significance in the figures of Michaelangelo [sic] or Veronese, the writers fail to note that these figures are always drawn and painted. The beauty and significance that they express, they are only able to achieve by means of a strong rendering of the gross material facts of bulk and shape, and colour. Such are the conditions of the very existence of plastic art.
Attention to a detail of treatment will perhaps illustrate this best. To attempt to cope with a wider field would, perhaps, be to risk vagueness. I am thinking of some frescoes of Raphael’s that are familiar to us all. I will take the figure of Juno in the group with Venus and Minerva. After all, it would be difficult for a lady to hold higher rank than did Juno. But Raphael conveys her to us by a most material form, with a fleshy lustrous face, like one of Rowlandson’s wenches. Her hands are gross, material hands, the hands, let us say, of a milkmaid. They hang from the wrists much more like a sailor’s hands do than like the almond-tipped fingers that clutch the satin of Mr. Sargent’s portraits.
It is because the portrait-painter is not free – he fills a useful and honourable place in a world of supply and demand – that I continue rather to draw attention to work outside these limitations. The more our art is serious, the more will it tend to avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen. The plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts. They call, in their servants, for a robust stomach and a great power of endurance, and while they will flourish in the scullery, or on the dunghill, they fade at a breath from the drawing-room. Stay! I had forgot. We have a use for the drawing-room – to caricature it.
Training and early career
Sickert was born in Munich, Germany on 31 May 1860, the eldest son of Oswald Sickert, a Danish-German artist, and his wife, Eleanor Louisa Henry, who was an illegitimate daughter of the British astronomer Richard Sheepshanks. In 1868, following the German annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, the family settled in Britain, where Oswald's work had been recommended by Freiherrin Rebecca von Kreusser to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery at the time. The family obtained British nationality. The young Sickert was sent to University College School from 1870 to 1871, before transferring to King's College School, where he studied until the age of 18. Though he was the son and grandson of painters, he first sought a career as an actor; he appeared in small parts in Sir Henry Irving's company, before taking up the study of art in 1881. After less than a year's attendance at the Slade School, Sickert left to become a pupil and etching assistant to James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Sickert's earliest paintings were small tonal studies painted alla prima from nature after Whistler's example.
In 1883, he travelled to Paris and met Edgar Degas, whose use of pictorial space and emphasis on drawing would have a powerful effect on Sickert's work. He developed a personal version of Impressionism, favouring sombre colouration. Following Degas' advice, Sickert painted in the studio, working from drawings and memory as an escape from "the tyranny of nature". In 1888 Sickert joined the New English Art Club, a group of French-influenced realist artists. Sickert's first major works, dating from the late 1880s, were portrayals of scenes in London music halls. One of the two paintings he exhibited at the NEAC in April 1888, Katie Lawrence at Gatti's, which portrayed a well known music hall singer of the era, incited controversy "more heated than any other surrounding an English painting in the late 19th century". Sickert's rendering was denounced as ugly and vulgar, and his choice of subject matter was deplored as too tawdry for art, as female performers were popularly viewed as morally akin to prostitutes. The painting announced what would be Sickert's recurring interest in sexually provocative themes.
In the late 1880s, Sickert spent much of his time in France, especially in Dieppe, which he first visited in mid-1885, and where his mistress, and possibly his illegitimate son, lived. During this period Sickert began writing art criticism for various publications. Between 1894 and 1904 Sickert made a series of visits to Venice, initially focussing on the city's topography; it was during his last painting trip in 1903–04 that, forced indoors by inclement weather, he developed a distinctive approach to the multiple figure tableau that he further explored on his return to Britain. The models for many of the Venetian paintings are believed to have been prostitutes, with whom Sickert may have had sex.
Sickert's fascination with urban culture accounted for his acquisition of studios in working-class sections of London, first in Cumberland Market in the 1890s, then in Camden Town in 1905. The latter location provided an event that would secure Sickert's prominence in the realist movement in Britain. On 11 September 1907, Emily Dimmock, a prostitute cheating on her partner, was murdered in her home at Agar Grove (then St Paul's Road), Camden. After sexual intercourse the man had slit her throat open while she was asleep, then left in the morning. The Camden Town murder became an ongoing source of prurient sensationalism in the press. For several years Sickert had already been painting lugubrious female nudes on beds, and continued to do so, deliberately challenging the conventional approach to life painting—"The modern flood of representations of vacuous images dignified by the name of 'the nude' represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy"—giving four of them, which included a male figure, the title, The Camden Town Murder, and causing a controversy which ensured attention for his work. These paintings do not show violence, however, but a sad thoughtfulness, explained by the fact that three of them were originally exhibited with completely different titles, one more appropriately being What Shall We Do for the Rent?, and the first in the series, Summer Afternoon.
While the painterly handling of the works inspired comparison to Impressionism, and the emotional tone suggested a narrative more akin to genre painting, specifically Degas's Interior, These and other works were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range. Sickert's best known work, Ennui (c. 1913), reveals his interest in Victorian narrative genres. The composition, which exists in at least five painted versions and was also made into an etching, depicts a couple in a dingy interior gazing abstractedly into empty space, as though they can no longer communicate with each other.
Just before World War I he championed the avant-garde artists Lucien Pissarro, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. At the same time he founded, with other artists, the Camden Town Group of British painters, named from the district of London in which he lived. This group had been meeting informally since 1905, but was officially established in 1911. It was influenced by Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, but concentrated on scenes of often drab suburban life; Sickert himself said he preferred the kitchen to the drawing room as a scene for paintings.
From 1908 to 1912 and again from 1915 to 1918, Sickert was an influential teacher at Westminster School of Art, where David Bomberg, Wendela Boreel and John Doman Turner were among his students. In 1910, he founded a private art school, Rowlandson House, in the Hampstead Road. It lasted until 1914, and for most of that period its co-principal and chief financial supporter was the painter Sylvia Gosse, a former student of Sickert's. He also briefly set up an art school in Manchester where his students included Harry Rutherford.
Late period
After the death of his second wife in 1920, Sickert relocated to Dieppe, where he painted scenes of casinos and café life until his return to London in 1922. In 1924 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA).
In 1926 he suffered an illness, thought to have been a minor stroke. In 1927 he abandoned his first name in favour of his middle name, and thereafter chose to be known as Richard Sickert. His style and subject matter also changed: Sickert stopped drawing, and instead painted from snapshots usually taken by his third wife, Thérèse Lessore, or from news photographs. The photographs were squared up for enlargement and transferred to canvas, with their pencil grids plainly visible in the finished paintings.
Seen by many of his contemporaries as evidence of the artist's decline, Sickert's late works are also his most forward-looking, and prefigure the practices of Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter. Other paintings from Sickert's late period were adapted from illustrations by Victorian artists such as Georgie Bowers and John Gilbert. Sickert, separating these illustrations from their original context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligibility partly dissolved, called the resulting works his "English Echoes".
Sickert painted an informal portrait of Winston Churchill in about 1927. Churchill's wife Clementine introduced him to Sickert, who had been a friend of her family. The two men got along so well that Churchill, whose hobby was painting, wrote to his wife that "He is really giving me a new lease of life as a painter."
Sickert tutored and mentored students of the East London Group, and exhibited alongside them at The Lefevre Gallery in November 1929.
Sickert made his last etching in 1929.
Sickert became a Royal Academician (RA) in March 1934 but resigned from the Academy on 9 May 1935 in protest against the president's refusal to support the preservation of Jacob Epstein's sculptural reliefs on the British Medical Association building in the Strand. In the last decade of his life, he depended increasingly on assistants, especially his wife, for the execution of his paintings.
One of Sickert's closest friends and supporters was newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, who accumulated the largest single collection of Sickert paintings in the world. This collection, with a private correspondence between Sickert and Beaverbook, is in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. In addition to having painted Beaverbrook, Sickert painted portraits of notables including Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Hugh Walpole, Valentine Browne, 6th Earl of Kenmare, and less formal depictions of Aubrey Beardsley, King George V, and Peggy Ashcroft.
Sickert died in Bath, Somerset in 1942, at the age of 81. He had spent much time in the city in his later years, and many of his paintings depict Bath's varied street scenes. He had been married three times: from 1885 until their divorce in 1899 to Ellen Cobden, a daughter of Richard Cobden; from 1911 until her death in 1920 to Christine Angus; and from 1926 until his death to the painter Thérèse Lessore.
Sickert's sister was Helena Swanwick, a feminist and pacifist active in the women's suffrage movement.
Style and subjects
For his earliest paintings, Sickert followed Whistler's practice of rapid, wet-in-wet execution using very fluid paint. He subsequently adopted a more deliberate procedure of painting pictures in multiple stages, and "attached a great deal of importance to what he called the 'cooking' side of painting". He preferred to paint not from nature but from drawings or, after the mid-1920s, from photographs or from popular prints by Victorian illustrators. After transferring the design to canvas by the use of a grid, Sickert made a rapid underpainting using two colours, which was allowed to dry thoroughly before the final colours were applied. He experimented tirelessly with the details of his method, always with the goal, according to his biographer Wendy Baron, of "paint[ing] quickly, in about two sittings, with the maximum economy and minimum of fuss".
Sickert tended to paint his subjects in series. He is identified particularly with domestic interior scenes, scenes of Venice, music hall and theatre scenes, and portraits. He painted very few still lifes. For his music hall subjects, Sickert often chose complex and ambiguous points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the audience, performer and orchestra becomes confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. The isolated rhetorical gestures of singers and actors seem to reach out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme of confused or failed communication between people appears frequently in his art. By emphasising the patterns of wallpaper and architectural decorations, Sickert created abstract decorative arabesques and flattened the three-dimensional space. His music hall pictures, like Degas' paintings of dancers and café-concert entertainers, connect the artificiality of art itself to the conventions of theatrical performance and painted backdrops.
Sickert often professed his distaste for what he termed the "beastly" character of thickly textured paint. In an article he wrote for The Fortnightly Review in 1911, he described his reaction to the paintings of Van Gogh: "I execrate his treatment of the instrument I love, these strips of metallic paint that catch the light like so many dyed straws ... my teeth are set on edge". In response to Alfred Wolmark's work he declared that "thick oil-paint is the most undecorative matter in the world".
Nonetheless, Sickert's paintings of the Camden Town Murder series of c. 1906–1909 were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range, as were numerous other obese nudes in the pre-World War I period in which the fleshiness of the figures is connected to the thickness of the paint—a device that was later adapted by Lucian Freud. The influence of these paintings on successive generations of British artists has been noted in the works of Freud, David Bomberg, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin, and Leon Kossoff.
In the 1910s and '20s, the dark, gloomy tones of his early paintings gradually brightened, and Sickert juxtaposed unexpected tones with a new boldness in works such as Brighton Pierrots (1915) and Portrait of Victor Lecourt (1921–24). His several self-portraits usually displayed an element of role-playing consistent with his early career as an actor: Lazarus Breaks his Fast (c. 1927) and The Domestic Bully (c. 1935–38) are examples. Sickert's late works display his preference for thinly scrubbed veils of paint, described by Helen Lessore as "a cool colour rapidly brushed over a warm underpainting (or vice versa) on a coarse canvas and in a restricted range allow[ing] the undercoat to 'grin through'".
Sickert insisted on the importance of subject matter in art, saying that "all the greater draughtsmen tell a story", but treated his subjects in a detached manner. According to the painter Frank Auerbach, "Sickert's detachment became increasingly evident in his uninhibited procedures. He made obvious his frequent reliance on snapshots and press photographs, he copied, used and took over the work of other, dead, artists and made extensive use, also, of the services of his assistants who played a large and increasing part in the production of his work."
Jack the Ripper
Sickert took a keen interest in the crimes of Jack the Ripper and believed he had lodged in a room used by the notorious serial killer. He had been told this by his landlady, who suspected a previous lodger. Sickert did a painting of the room and titled it Jack the Ripper's Bedroom (Manchester Art Gallery). It shows a dark, melancholy room with most details obscured.
Although for over 70 years there was no mention of Sickert's being a suspect in the Ripper crimes, in modern times three books have been published whose authors maintain that Sickert was Jack the Ripper or his accomplice.
- In 1976, Stephen Knight, in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, maintained that Sickert had been forced to become an accomplice in the Ripper murders. Knight's information came from Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be Sickert's illegitimate son. Even though Gorman later admitted he had lied, Knight's book was responsible for a conspiracy theory that accuses royalty and freemasonry of complicity in the Ripper murders.
- In 1990, Jean Overton Fuller, in her book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes, maintained that Sickert was the killer.
- In 2002, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, maintained that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. A psychological motivation for Sickert was said to be a congenital anomaly of his penis. Cornwell purchased 31 of Sickert's paintings, and some in the art world have said that she destroyed one of them in a search for Sickert's DNA, but Cornwell denies having done this. Cornwell claimed she was able to scientifically prove that mitochondrial DNA from one of more than 600 Ripper-letters sent to Scotland Yard and mitochondrial DNA from a letter written by Sickert belong to only one percent of the population. In 2017, Cornwell published another book on the subject, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert in which she uncovers what she believes to be further evidence for Sickert's guilt.
In 2004, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in its article on Sickert, dismissed any claim that he was Jack the Ripper as "fantasy".
Personal papers
Walter Sickert's personal papers are held at Islington Local History Centre. Additional papers are held at several other archives, particularly the Tate Gallery Archive.
See also
- Elwin Hawthorne - artist, worked for a period as Sickert's assistant
See also
