Art: Errand Boy

When Whistler sent his famous Artist’s Mother to the 1883 Paris Salon, his bright-eyed errand boy was 23-year-old Walter Sickert. Sickert made the trip count, took a long, penetrating look at the experiments of such French artists as Degas and Manet. Back home in London, he slowly and surely began painting himself out of his place as Whistler’s prize pupil into a spot as one of Britain’s first & foremost impressionists. Forty of Errand Boy Sickert’s paintings on view in London last week showed how good he was.

Rumpled Beds. For his teacher’s fashionable Chelsea haunts, young Sickert substituted a series of battered studio digs in north and central London. There he sketched and painted scenes of British low life with a gusto and an eye for beauty in squalor that rivaled Degas and Lautrec. Like Lautrec, he doted on the dramatic lighting and rowdy shenanigans of turn-of-the-century music halls. He also liked to paint outdoors.

On excursions to Dieppe and Venice, he corseted the limp, nebulous, Whistlerian technique with steel-ribbed draftsmanship and an exact sense of time & place. He told his pupils: “You must be able to walk about in a picture. It should give you the sensation of something exciting happening, taking place in a box as it were, only the front of the box has been taken away so that you may look inside.”

Sickert liked to paint people in action. “Start with a piece of furniture—a table, a chair or a bed. Relate your figures to this setting and let us have them doing something—making love, quarreling, misconducting themselves—as you please—but doing something.” His aim was to catch his subject unaware, “before the fizziness in his momentary mood becomes still and flat.” The fizz is still in Sickert’s best paintings: his nudes resting on the rumpled bed of his dingy studio, the Sunday afternoon dejection of the middleaged, parlor-bound couple in Ennui, the ironic, over-the-shoulder glimpse of a bedroom dialogue in The Prevaricator.

New Style. Sickert himself kept on bubbling until the age of 82. At 72 he caused a sensation by exhibiting a portrait of George V painted from a photograph of the king in bowler and overcoat, pointing up the resemblance of the monarch to his bearded horse-trainer. At 74 he was made a Royal Academician, huffily resigned the following year because other Academy members failed to come to the defense of controversial Sculptor Jacob Epstein. In his last years, he changed his signature (from Walter to his middle name, Richard, because it seemed more euphonious), grew a sprawling beard and even changed his style. He painted oil versions of Victorian engravings by such artists as Cruikshank and Sir John Gilbert which were as highly colored and gay as his earlier paintings were low-keyed and grim. “It’s such a good arrangement,” he explained fliply. “Cruikshank and Gilbert do all the work and I get all the money.”

Until his death in 1942, he resisted all attempts by reverent younger artists to pigeonhole him as Britain’s “grand old man of painting.” At one of his last shows, he stood in front of an early work, exclaimed, “That’s not a Sickert! It’s much too good for a Sickert.”