Walter Sickert at Tate Britain by Sue Hubbard
Who was Walter Sickert? Go to Tate Britain and you will find numerous self-portraits of this one-time actor turned painter in their current retrospective. In Juvenile Lead, painted in 1907, he wears a bowler hat, wing collar and owl glasses. Elsewhere he poses as different biblical figures, including Abraham. In the Front at Hove, he is an elderly paramour seated on a bench chatting to a seemingly disinterested young woman in a little cloche hat. The surtitle Turpe Senex Miles Turpe Senilis Amour translates from the Latin as ‘An old soldier is a wretched thing, so also is senile love.’ This may have an autobiographical resonance but, on the whole, none of these images really tell us about the man. They simply offer multiple masks and personae that bring to mind the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa’s numerous ‘heteronyms’ adopted to explore his response to the world, whilst offering emotional distance. As his first biographer rather despairingly asked when writing on Sickert: ‘Is there…no fixed point, no common denominator, that we may take hold of and say, “this is the real man”?
Turpe Senex Miles Turpe Senilis Amour, 1930, Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 76.2 cm
Sickert continues to remain unknowable, despite his self-portraits and the investigations of the American crime writer, Patricia Cornwell, who was convinced, on the ‘evidence’ of his Camden Town paintings of men and nudes in impoverished north London rooms, that Sickert was Jack-the-Ripper. To this effect she spent £2m buying up 31 of his paintings, a number of letters and his writing desk, even destroying one of his paintings in a desperate hunt for ‘clues.’ But the real Sickert has continued to remain as elusive as ever. Regarded by many as the finest British painter between Turner and Bacon, Sickert certainly had a fascination with the notorious murders. But Cornwell seems (remarkably for a writer) to have lacked the imagination to consider that what Sickert was most likely interested in was how paintings could tell stories and suggest multiple narratives. He was a man who refused to be pigeonholed, regularly changing his sartorial appearance as well as his accommodation. In 1893 he gave up a luxurious live-in studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea, to take a small room at 12 Cheyne Walk, one of six artisans’ dwellings in Milton Chambers. This deliberate life-style choice would continue for the rest of his life as he sought out similar modest studios.
As a young man, Sickert’s original aim was to be an actor (a profession of dissembling and disguise.) Never progressing beyond small parts, he took himself off to the Slade. He didn’t stay there long, becoming studio assistant to James Whistler, an artist who was to have a considerable impact on his style. Though the influence of the theatre, with its layers of artifice and fantasy, would continue to loom large in his work. It was probably due to his meeting with Degas – a great ballet lover - that he developed an interest in the music hall and popular entertainment. Tiring, also, of what he regarded as the limitations of Whistler’s alla primer (wet-on-wet) approach - where the pigments are laid down in one sitting - his meeting with Degas lead him into new painterly experimentations. The Laundry Shop, one of a number of small, dark intense paintings executed in France, uses of a grid-like composition that delineates individual components, unlike Whistler’s flatter style. Deciding, in 1898, that he couldn’t stand another winter in London - it was ‘too dark’ - Sickert decamped to Dieppe. There he became au fait with the latest French movements of the Impressionists and the Fauves, along with artists such as Camille Pissarro. Historic continental destinations were ideal settings for his internationalism, and his theatrical and symbolist leanings. In Venice, he painted the looming façade of St. Marks at sunset as if it were a stage set.
The Laundry Shop, Dieppe, France, 1885, oil on canvas, 50.2 x 39.4 cm
But it was the music hall that provided Sickert with his most distinctive vocabulary with which to observe modern urban life. At the turn of the twentieth century there were more than 300 hundred such venues in London. Sickert visited Collin’s Music Hall in Islington, The Bedford in Camden, the Oxford in Oxford Street, and the Middlesex in Dury Lane on a regular basis to watch popular female performers such as Marie Lloyd and Minnie Cunningham strutting their stuff and singing songs full of innuendo and double entendres. No doubt the music hall appealed because it provided a space where entrenched Victorian concepts of class were, to some extent, eroded. Though with their predominantly male and working class punters, the ‘respectable’ middle-classes largely considered them to be places of immorality, vice and prostitution. But for Sickert, all the world was a stage. Along with the female turns, he painted the musicians in the orchestra pit and the bowler hatted beaux in their boxes. In Noctes Ambroisianae, a bunch of working class, cloth-capped lads can be seen gawping and, no doubt, cat-calling up in the gods. Sickert loved the complex rococo architecture of the music hall and the relationship created between audience and performer. Mirrors placed at different angles allowed him to catch the complex perspectives, making visible what might not have been seen with the naked eye. There is something very modern about these paintings that ask who is doing the looking and who the watching? Ostensibly they privilege the male gaze, but often the viewpoint is more ambiguous, suggesting multiple scenarios and alternative narratives.
But it is, without doubt, his nudes and Camden Town paintings that have kept Sickert in the limelight. He wasn’t interested in painting ‘Summer Exhibition’ style nudes - ‘vacuous images’ as he called them - but naked, mostly working women. Women with imperfect bodies and pubic hair, often forced by poverty to make their living through sex work. Their sickly, post-coital bodies, lie on brass beds in seedy rooms, exhausted among the crumpled sheets. In The Shoe with the Rose, the outline of the slumped figure is barely discernible except for a foot and a flung arm. Beneath the bed, centre stage, is a single high-heeled shoe with a cross bar. Has this been flung off in a fit of passion or violently removed? It’s hard to know. The lining is a deep rose pink, so it’s impossible not to read it as a gash or a wound, or the fleshy contours of an available female vulva. A number of these interior paintings set up scenarios and conversations. The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do for Rent, 1908 is full or Lawrentian tribulation and angst. Is the seated man on the bed next to a naked woman a punter, a desperate husband pimping his wife for a few shillings or a serial killer? Perhaps, Sickert is saying. It doesn’t matter. That for those in this social class with few financial choices, prostitution is its own form of murder.
The Rose Shoe, c.1904, oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm
The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do about the Rent? oil on canvas, 25.6 × 35.6 cm, c.1908
In his final years Sickert continued to be attracted to the theatre, painting Peggy Ashcroft and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Queen Isabella in Edward II, along with the high-kicking Tiller Girls. He also drew on the cinema, film and photography, as can be seen in the painting taken from the poster of the gangster film Bullets or Ballots, starring Edward G. Robinson and Joan Blondell, where Sickert’s Edward G. bears an uncanny resemblance to George Galloway.
Sickert lived in a time of great change and social turmoil. As a painter he is a bridge between numerous worlds – between the social constraints of the 19th century and the technological changes and comparative social freedoms of the 20th, between covert sexuality and apparent public morality and the strictures of English painting and French Impressionism, between the simulacrum and reality. His identification with Jack the Ripper has never completely gone away and will continue to fascinate. He lived in two of the houses where he claimed the Ripper had lived and it’s been suggested that some of the Ripper’s letters, especially the one where the phrase ‘catch me if you can’ is written in pencil and washed over with a brush stroke of red ink, is the work of a painter’s hand. But there is no proof and we may never know the truth. What we can deduce from the paintings he left is that this was a man who liked to tell stories and use paint to create potent, often ambiguous scenarios of early 20th century life. A painter who not only broke new ground but who, it seems to me, had great empathy for the plight of the poor, especially women.
Sue Hubbard is an award winning poet, novelist and freelance critic. Her latest novel, Rainsongs, is published by Duckworth and her fourth poetry collection, Swimming to Albania by www.salmonpoetry.com. Her fourth novel, Flatlands, is due from Pushkin Press in 2023. They are re-issuing her second novel, Girl in White, on the life of the painter Paula Modersohn Becker to coincide with the RA show Making Modernism exhibiting her work with that of Kathë Kollwitz.