Page 24 - Studio International - September 1974

of this century. All three men continued for extensive an acquaintance with the art of the Sickert bracketed Ford Madox Brown, John
most of their lives to produce a fair number of French avant garde. Leech and Charles Keene together with
good and professional paintings in conservative Although Sickert had soon gained a position Mantegna, Michelangelo, Veronese, Canaletto
styles, and gradually fell from the view of at the forefront of the more progressive group and Hogarth in a discussion of 'illustrative'
modernist observers while many lesser painters within the NEAC, and although he had exhibited painting in his opinion undeservedly
became celebrated for their incompetent with a 'London Impressionist' group at the derogated.11) Sickert's interest in the
attempts to ape a modern manner. Goupil Gallery in 1889, he was no mere illustrative traditions of art, and his often
provincial Impressionist. He is impossible teasing respect for ill-considered figures from
Of all the established painters in England to pigeonhole. His introduction to the the reviled era of Victorian England, were more
between 1900 and 1910, Sickert best represented catalogue of the Goupil exhibition defines unfashionable then even than now. He was
the case for the development of an Impressionism in terms of a thoroughly virtually alone in providing some means in his
independent art out of the influences of later Whistlerian aesthetic, as Wendy Baron has art by which a fraction of the more humanitarian
nineteenth-century French painting. This had observed in her excellent monograph8, and yet concerns of the nineteenth-century artists
much to do with the nature of his family in 1891 he was writing in an article on 'Modern might be transmitted to a minority among their
background and early experience as a painter. Realism in Painting' in defence of Millet and of early twentieth-century successors. Although
His father was a Danish painter, himself the painting from memory, as against the 'plein-air' this was by no means the result of any kind of
son of a painter, who emigrated to England in technique which characterized the work of the deliberate campaign on Sickert's part, his taste
1868 when Walter Richard Sickert was eight Impressionists and the spontaneous 'alla prima' in art was certainly consistent with his social
years old. His mother was half English and touch employed both by the Impressionists and mobility and with his natural inclination at
half Irish, brought up abroad. After a brief by Whistler.9 He resigned from the New times to seek companionship outside the well-
spell as an actor and a briefer one at the Slade English in 1897, and thus, so far as younger protected institutions of artistic society.
he studied under Whistler in 1882-3. (Perhaps painters were concerned, escaped identification Sickert first met Spencer Gore in Dieppe in
significantly, he often visited William Morris with the increasingly conservative image 1904, when the young man came to visit him.
during the later 188os in company with his of that body; although he rejoined in 1906 after The previous winter, while staying in Venice,
first wife, the daughter of Richard Cobden, he returned to England, his contribution to the Sickert had embarked upon the series of
Liberal politician and Free-Trader.) From New English exhibitions must merely have paintings of figures in interiors which marks
1883 until 1905 he was mostly abroad, principally made clear how much he had developed and the beginning of his maturity as a painter,

in Venice, Dieppe and Paris. From his first how far his contemporaries had retrenched. It but he was later to pay generous tribute to
meeting with him in 1883 for several years he is also significant that Sickert remained virtually Gore's influence upon his work immediately
was close to Edgar Degas, who must have untouched by either Impressionism or Post- after their meeting.12 Certainly by 1906, when
provided a powerful antidote to the atmospherics Impressionism in their more extreme aspects. Sickert loaned Gore his house at Neuville,
of Whistler, and whose work, based as it was He had plainly learned from the 'documentary' the two men were close friends and were
upon the study of the human figure in both quality of Degas' art and from the obstinate learning from each other, sometimes evidently
private and 'social' contexts, offered a strong integrity of Pissarro's and had also absorbed painting together in the same studio. Gore
alternative to the mainline of Impressionism. something from the early interiors of Bonnard had recently adopted a method of
(Years later, in 1927, Sickert was to write of and Vuillard, but there is little in his art that organization of compositions which allowed
Degas as 'the greatest painter of the age'.) can be traced back to Monet, Renoir, Cezanne greater priority for the expressive potential
Sickert's was a very 'modern' and a very Van Gogh or Gauguin. During a stay with of strong colour. Sickert and Gore shared a
cosmopolitan education for a painter in England Spencer Gore in Dieppe in 1906 it was clear love of the music hall and both painted some
in the late nineteenth century. Besides Degas, that he had more to say about the academic of their best pictures on music hall themes; so
he came to know Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin, artists of Victorian England than about the far as response to the drama of light and colour
Signac, Bonnard and Vuillard. None of his Post-Impressionists in contemporary France.'° was concerned, Gore's was by far the more
English contemporaries could claim nearly so (Dr Baron quotes an article of 1922 in which intense response, if not at the time of their

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