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Walter Sickert: A Life
Matthew Sturgis
This edition does not include illustrations.The first major life of the outstanding British painter – and Jack the Ripper suspect – Walter Sickert (1860-1942), by the highly acclaimed biographer of Aubrey Beardsley.Walter Richard Sickert is perhaps the outstanding figure of British art during the last hundred years. Many contemporary painters, from Hodgkin and Bacon to Auerbach and Kossof, acknowledge a debt to his influence. His career spanned six decades of unceasing experiment and achievement. As a young artist, he was welcomed and encouraged by Degas. He was the disciple of Whistler and mentor of Beardsley. He founded the London Impressionists and the Camden Town Group. He was taken up by both the Woolfs and the Sitwells. He gave painting lessons to Winston Churchill.His energy was prodigious and his personality fascinating: he was also an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, polemicist, teacher and wit. He relished controversy: his early paintings of London music halls and his late works, based on 18th-century etchings and contemporary news photographs, provoked outraged criticism from conventional commentators.Sturgis also devotes an appendix to charting in detail Sickert's posthumous life as a player in the 'Jack the Ripper' circus, assessing (and demolishing) the arguments of Patricia Cornwell and others in the light of his own discoveries.
WALTER SICKERT
A Life
Matthew Sturgis
For Rebecca
CONTENTS
Cover (#u502c0db3-ffb4-5a86-bd69-691627dc847d)
Title Page (#udac3aac4-a352-5df2-be0e-cfc3aa893487)
Dedication (#uc321603d-afc0-57a1-bb46-e0ba82b09fb3)
1 A Well-Bred Artist (#u0e6da0b8-37af-5b9f-ac57-b47768689e3a)
I The Münchener Kind’l’ (#uf9d6c286-56e1-5584-8011-4d9f7e02c2f7)
II A New Home (#uc9e61750-7a84-5bf8-a0bc-a5afd4020190)
III L’enfant Terrible (#ub8ecbc65-39b3-5ddb-82cd-b599a20daf55)
2 Apprentice or Student? (#ud577379f-6333-52e8-ae07-5aff4abc2db0)
I The Utility Player (#u3608ee4e-da0e-5732-b84e-be4136f6e3db)
II Whistler’s Studio (#ua555461b-0d38-528a-bced-df68f5c000c3)
III Relative Values (#ufb628309-c21a-5836-b4ff-e36e338ccad4)
3 Impressions and Opinions (#u579f9e37-f07a-54e9-9c30-c622faaaeb1e)
I The Butterfly Propaganda (#u4200c9c5-0685-5c79-a84f-a6eefaa0610f)
II A New English Artist (#u84094583-5c33-5eb5-8717-9b3ed272e3bc)
III The London Impressionists (#ue7a1df2d-12a9-542e-966e-8a85f1285a5b)
IV Unfashionable Portraiture (#ube6c3541-69dd-542a-9092-c5d0a6aa8dcb)
V In Black and White (#litres_trial_promo)
4 The End of the Act (#litres_trial_promo)
I Gathering Clouds (#litres_trial_promo)
II Bridge of Sighs (#litres_trial_promo)
III The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (#litres_trial_promo)
IV Amantium Irae (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Jack Abroad (#litres_trial_promo)
I A Watering Place Out of Season (#litres_trial_promo)
II Changing Effects (#litres_trial_promo)
III Gaîté Montparnasse (#litres_trial_promo)
IV Dal Vero (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Londra Benedetta (#litres_trial_promo)
I The Lady in Red (#litres_trial_promo)
II Ambrosial Nights (#litres_trial_promo)
III Mr Sickert at Home (#litres_trial_promo)
IV The Artist as Teacher (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Contre Jour (#litres_trial_promo)
I Les Affaires de Camden Town (#litres_trial_promo)
II An Imperfect Modern (#litres_trial_promo)
III Red, White, and Blue (#litres_trial_promo)
IV Suspense (#litres_trial_promo)
8 The New Age (#litres_trial_promo)
I The Conduct of a Talent (#litres_trial_promo)
II Private View (#litres_trial_promo)
III How Old Do I Look? (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Lazarus Raised (#litres_trial_promo)
I Over the Footlights (#litres_trial_promo)
II Home Life (#litres_trial_promo)
III Bathampton (#litres_trial_promo)
IV Cheerio (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript Walter Sickert: Case Closed (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements and Preface (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE A Well-Bred Artist (#ulink_05f0e550-af0c-53aa-8489-a6ff7b2ba39e)
I THE MÜNCHENER KIND’L’ (#ulink_ca3868df-cd73-57d0-943a-fd98a76312ec)
He is a dear little fellow.
(Eleanor Sickert to Oswald Adalbert Sickert)
Walter Richard Sickert was born on 31 May 1860 in a first-floor flat at 59 Augustenstrasse, Munich, in what was then the independent kingdom of Bavaria.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was the first-born child of Oswald Adalbert Sickert and his wife Eleanor. Oswald Sickert was a Dane, from the town of Altona in the Duchy of Holstein. He was a trained artist, with ambitions as a painter, but he was constrained to work as a hack draughtsman-on-wood for a Bavarian illustrated comic-paper called the Fliegende Blätter. Eleanor – or Nelly as she was known by her affectionate husband and her friends and relatives – was English by birth. The couple spoke mainly English at home.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their new son was christened by the English chaplain at Munich: he was given the names Walter Richard.
(#litres_trial_promo) Walter was chosen as being a name that looked – even if it did not sound – the same in both English and German.
(#litres_trial_promo) Richard was the name of the boy’s maternal grandfather, the late Revd Richard Sheepshanks, a figure whose presence loomed over the young family, half beneficent, half reproachful.
Richard Sheepshanks had not been a conventional clergyman. He had scarcely been a clergyman at all. He never held any cure. His interest in the celestial sphere, though keen, had been scientific. He made his reputation as an astronomer and mathematician. The Sheepshanks came of prosperous Yorkshire stock. The family in the generation before had made a fortune in cloth, supplying – so it was said – material for military greatcoats to the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. The money from the Leeds factories amassed in this profitable trade allowed Richard and his five siblings to indulge their interests and enthusiasms. One brother, Thomas, chose Brighton and dissipation.
(#litres_trial_promo) Another, John, dedicated himself to art: he moved to London and built up a large and important collection of English paintings, which he exhibited to the public at his house in Rutland Gate and bequeathed to the nation in 1857, six years before his death.
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Richard turned to the sciences. A brilliant university career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was crowned with a mathematics fellowship in 1817. He briefly contemplated the prospect of both the law and the Church and secured the necessary qualifications for both. (Having taken holy orders, he always styled himself ‘the Reverend’.) On receiving his inheritance, however, he was able to direct all his considerable energies to scientific research. He became a member of the Geological and Astronomical Societies, and was for several years the editor of the latter’s Monthly Notes. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the University of London. His interests were many, ranging from demographics to the study of weights and measures. He had a particular passion for fine scientific instruments and devoted most of his income to buying them. He also busied himself in the intellectual and political disputes of the scientific world.
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In scientific circles Richard Sheepshanks was greatly respected – much loved by his friends and not a little feared by his enemies. He was, in the restrained words of his close colleague, the astronomer Augustus de Morgan, a man of ‘very decided opinions’. And he was not shy of expressing them. His first professional training had been as a lawyer, and throughout his academic career he had a relish for controversies. He was, as he himself put it, well suited to such business, having ‘leisure, courage and contempt for opinion when he knew he was right’. He was well armed with a ready, if somewhat sarcastic, wit and a piquant turn of phrase. But in matters of what he considered to be of real importance he would – according to one obituarist – drop these weapons in favour of a more ‘earnest deportment’ and a more ‘temperate’ utterance. Despite being of ‘hardly middle stature’, having red-tinged hair and the inevitable side-whiskers of mid-Victorian fashion, he was, from the evidence of his portraits, a handsome man. He was also excellent company – clever, witty, well read in both the classics and in modern literature, and widely travelled in Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was knowledgeable too about art; and, tipped off by his brother John, commissioned Thomas Lawrence to paint a portrait of his beloved elder sister, Anne.
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Anne Sheepshanks was as remarkable as her brother. A woman of enormous practical capability, intelligence, and sound sense, she encouraged and supported Richard in all his endeavours. She allied her resources to his, sharing his interests, his cares, and his house. The home they established together at 30 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury – not far from the British Museum – became a lively gathering place for many of the intellectual luminaries of scientific London. They even built their own small observatory in the garden, from which, in an age before saturated street-lighting, they were able to mark the passage of the stars.
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The Reverend Richard Sheepshanks – like his sister – never married. His fellowship at Cambridge was dependent upon his remaining a bachelor, and he seems to have been in no hurry to give up his position, his salary, or his independence. Nevertheless, he did not allow professional considerations to stand altogether between him and the opposite sex.
It is not known exactly how or when he encountered Eleanor Henry. Indeed, very little is known about Eleanor Henry at all, except that she was Irish, fair-haired and handsome, and was a dancer on the London stage.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps Mr Sheepshanks picked her out of a chorus line. Or perhaps he met her in the street. At the beginning of the 1830s she was living in Henrietta Street, a little cul-de-sac behind Brunswick Square, near to the Sheepshanks’ London home.
(#ulink_34b38bb9-afac-538c-997e-7fb18d93abe5) The popular reputation of dancers in the nineteenth century set them very low in the moral order; they were ranked beneath even actresses, and set almost on a par with prostitutes. This picture, however, was certainly a distortion. Although ‘respectability’ was a rather fluid concept during the early Victorian age, most ballet girls actually came from modestly ‘respectable’ homes, and lived – as far as can be ascertained – modestly ‘respectable’ lives.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eleanor Henry’s position seems to confirm this point. For a start she was married. Her husband was a Mr James Henry. He listed his profession as ‘Solicitor’, although he does not appear in the law lists of the period and may well have been little more than a lawyer’s clerk.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the beginning of the 1830s they were living together in the house of a Mrs Henry (perhaps James’s mother).
(#litres_trial_promo) Despite this unpropitious domestic arrangement, the Revd Richard Sheepshanks succeeded not only in forming an attachment with Eleanor but also in fathering a child on her. A daughter was born on 19 August 1830.
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Mr Henry’s attitude to, or indeed knowledge of, his wife’s liaison is unknown. He did, however, give his surname and his blessing to the infant. It was he, rather than Richard Sheepshanks, who attended the christening at St Pancras Parish Church and who had himself listed as the child’s legal father. The little girl was baptized Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry. The last Christian name is something of a mystery, as the Henrys did not, as far as records show, belong to the Moravian sect.
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The young Eleanor Louisa – or Nelly – was brought up in the Henry household. If Richard Sheepshanks provided some assistance he did so covertly. Nevertheless, his interest in his natural daughter does seem to have been real and, given the proximity of Woburn Place to Henrietta Street, he must have had opportunities for observing her. Almost nothing is known of Nelly Henry’s childhood, except that it was not happy. The demands of her mother’s stage work meant that she was often neglected. She did, however, show an early love for music. Her mother sang to her, and the songs of the passing street performers also caught her ear, making a lasting impression on her memory and her imagination.
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The Henrys moved from Henrietta Street in 1833. They disappear from view but almost certainly remained in London, for, at some moment later in the decade, Eleanor broke with her husband and began a relationship with Samuel Buchanan Green, a dancing master from Highgate. She took her daughter with her and, though there is no evidence to suggest that she married Mr Green, she took his name and the young Nelly came to regard Mr Green as her ‘step-father’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In November 1838, when Eleanor gave birth to a son, christened Alfred, she listed her name on the birth certificate as ‘Green, late Henry’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1840, the Greens established a dancing school in connection with the Princess Theatre in Oxford Street. The teaching studio was immediately behind the theatre at 36 Castle Street and the family lived above it – an arrangement that can only have increased the 10-year-old Nelly’s love of music.
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Perhaps the Revd Richard Sheepshanks disapproved of these new domestic conditions, or maybe the arrival of young Alfred placed a strain on the resources of the Green household; perhaps the Sheepshanks’ own plans to move out of London precipitated the change. Whatever the reason, at about this time Richard offered to take his natural daughter under his own care, to remove her from the stage-door world of Castle Street, to arrange for her schooling, and to provide in some as yet unspecified measure for her future. The offer was accepted and, at the beginning of the 1840s, the old loosely fixed order was broken up.
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