Life begins at 50

Walter Sickert is remembered as a friend of more famous folk. Jad Adams wonders if he is worthy of Matthew Sturgis's extended biography
Walter Sickert by Matthew Sturgis
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Life begins at 50


Walter Sickert: A Life
by Matthew Sturgis
768pp, HarperCollins, £30

Matthew Sturgis comes from writing a biography of Aubrey Beardsley, whose life was glorious and eventful but brief. Now he brings us Beardsley's near contemporary for the early years, Walter Sickert, who lived to over 80. The comparison between the artists is revealing, for by the time Sickert had reached the age at which Beardsley died, he had achieved little.

Sickert, born in 1860, was the son of a painter who had devoted his life to art, "a dog of a profession", and made a poor living from it. Sickert junior therefore went on the stage, joining the Lyceum theatre of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, in this way introducing himself to what was to be a theme of his life: to be remembered because he could be bracketed with more interesting people. Indeed, his story begins to brighten more than 100 pages into this biography, when Sickert, having decided to be a painter, comes under the influence of the altogether more stimulating figure of Whistler. Sickert was to describe him as "A beacon of light and happiness to everyone who was privileged to come within its comforting and brightening rays." No measured criticism there, then.

Sickert would write down Whistler's words of wisdom on his cuff so as not to forget them; his sycophantic behaviour extended to carrying the Master's weighty lithographic stone when they went out together "in case inspiration should come during or after dinner" and he could dash off a sketch.

The relationship broke up in one of the petty feuds of the tiny art world: Whistler turned against Sickert because he saw him walking out of a Bond Street gallery in the company of two of his enemies; another Whistler disciple sued Sickert for claiming there was a material difference between lithographic work on the stone and on transfer paper. These were people with too much time on their hands.

Moving to France in 1890, Sickert came more profoundly under the influence of Edgar Degas. Sturgis is excellent on the development of Sickert's technique, particularly the way he had to learn from Degas to snatch images of movement as photographs do, while he sat in a darkened auditorium watching music-hall turns. He would return night after night to the same seat to watch the same show so as to imprint minute gestures and details of the performers' costumes on his memory.

Sturgis charts the subtle shift of Sickert from being a "Whistlerite" to an Impressionist, one of the leading members of the New English Art Club of which Whistler was not a member. With Whistler dead and Degas infirm in Paris, Sickert in London from 1906 came into his own.

By the age of 50, on page 412, Sickert is clearly becoming one of those characters who is more interesting as he gets older. He becomes more outrageous as an artist too: when a 22-year-old prostitute was murdered by a client in Camden Town, he began the Camden Town series of pictures of murdered women (none conforms to the known facts of the actual killing). He became known for paintings of working-class women in sordid surroundings and titles like "A Tiff", "Off to the Pub" and "My Awful Dad".

In middle age, he became eccentrically adolescent, paying great attention to the precise cut of his beard; dragging one reluctant woman after another to the Camden Registry Office; seducing his students at the Westminster Technical Institute (one of whom made a point of passing on to posterity how often Sickert came inside her when they first had sex). The early acting training never seems to have left him: despite his technical accomplishment as an artist, there is always the feeling he is playing the part of a painter rather than living it.

True to form, even Sickert's recent renewed notoriety has been because of the association of his name with a famous contemporary. Sturgis devotes an appendix to demolishing the novelist Patricia Cornwell's contention that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. The theory ultimately derived from the notorious self-publicist Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be the son of Sickert and the grandson of Prince Albert Victor. Sturgis points out that Sickert was abroad for most of the summer of 1888 when the Ripper was at work. Moreover, the character of the real "Ripper" is not hard to judge: he was as self-fulfilled and colourful a character as Peter Sutcliffe or Dennis Nilsen: that is, not at all. A brutal serial killer is, by definition, not a man with a lifetime of artistic fulfilment.

Greater editorial discipline would have produced a tighter book which would have gained from shortening and the removal of the distracting footnotes that would be better incorporated into the text or placed in the excellent reference section. It might also have picked up some errors: "sky-blue" was slang for watery milk (and for gin, which it resembled) not for bread and milk; "baby father" is a term for men whose sole contribution to their children is the production of sperm, it cannot be used to describe a father who lived with and attempted to provide for their children as Sickert's father did; "bolshy" is an anachronism to describe anyone almost four decades before the Bolshevik revolution.

Sickert certainly deserves an authoritative biography, but does he deserve 768 pages? There is evidence of long labour with the manuscripts but the question remains, not of Sturgis's scholarship, which is exemplary, but whether his subject is worth it. If it seems churlish to attack Sickert for not being as interesting as Van Gogh (who is?), the point really is whether he merits the exhibition-by-exhibition attention to detail that yields rewards for a truly great artist, but here just feels like repetition. The quality of Sturgis's workmanship exceeds his material.
