Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

The subject of Matthew Sturgis’ first biography was Aubrey Beardsley who died aged 25. This time the author has gone to the other end of the age spectrum with a book about the grand old man of English painting, Walter Sickert, who lived to be 82. It’s a massive tome to say the least but, from start to finish, Sturgis’ equipoise of information and readability makes it an insightful book.

From a young child who moved to England from Munich with his family, Sickert was precocious and interested in drawing. His own father had tried and failed to make a living as a painter and called the life of an artist “a dog of a profession”. Sickert’s youth was fairly cosmopolitan – his father began to bring him to the Royal Academy when he was 11 and Oscar Wilde came to visit regularly. His artistic life actually began as an actor and there’s a quote in the book that says, “to understand Sickert it has to be remembered that he was an actor in his youth”.

A habitual exhibitionist, Sickert moved from the stage to painting and began his artistic career as Whistler’s assistant before studying with Degas in Paris. From both artists, he learned his craft, with Whistler coaching him in traditional composition and tone while Degas instilled in him the view that subject matter need not always be grand. Degas also influenced Sickert’s predominant style, which was impressionism, with a hint of modernism and realism. His career was slow burn and he worked for a time in the 1920s as Winston Churchill’s painting instructor.

Despite an exhaustive volume of source information, Sturgis carefully weighs up the right amount of fact, anecdote, biographical detail and points of artistic note. His tone throughout is engaging, assuredly keeping the reader interested while informing them at the same time.

In artistic terms, Sickert was a peripheral but pivotal figure in many ways. He represents the period of the First World War between the shift away from Impressionism to Modernism. His methodology never varied and he liked to work from sketches, under-paintings and photographs. From Whistler, he acquired a love of paint itself calling it “a beautiful thing, with loveliness and charm and infinite variety” and he spent a lot on materials (despite his constant penury) and always experimented with ingredients. If he didn’t receive the kind of acclaim he deserved in his lifetime, it wasn’t due to the quality of his paintings. Like Degas he favoured humble, domestic scenes and painted situations he knew best. In one of his most affecting works, Ennui, an old man smokes a cigar distractedly at a kitchen table. A woman leans on a sideboard staring blankly at the wall (or is she staring at a painting that is almost left out of the view?). It’s an effortless snapshot of life, heaving with emotion and implication.

In his lifetime, and Sturgis doesn’t shy away from this, Sickert was as famous for his personal life as he was his career. As one acquaintance puts it in the book “he was a man with a deep seriousness about painting, and a deep unseriousness about everything else”. Married three times, he had an affair with Peggy Ashcroft and slept with many of his models and the barmaids of the pubs he frequented. One story recounted in the book says that he proposed to one of his models when they were in flagrante – she replied by reminding him that he was already married. As Sickert himself said: “You can’t really love more than two or three women at a time”.

To discuss Walter Sickert, one has to mention the Jack the Ripper theories and in this book, Sturgis does so reluctantly. The stories first surfaced in a 1976 book called Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen Knight. Crime writer Patricia Cornwell built on that and published Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed in 2002. Based on DNA comparisons and Sickert’s paintings, she put forward a theory that Sickert was in fact the real Jack the Ripper. Cornwell also included the hypothesis that Sickert had a deformed penis from birth, which she claims made him incapable of sex and bitter towards women, especially prostitutes.

Sturgis is obviously irritated by Cornwell’s ‘research’, which involved tampering with Sickert’s paintings in an effort to find DNA and only deals with her theory in a postscript. He systematically discredits her methodology and conclusions, as it he doesn’t want it to sully what is essentially an art biography. Matthew Sturgis is obviously very interested in and knowledgeable about his subject, and his book attempts to reclaim Sickert as an artist and not as a fictitious murderer.

This is a very well written, readable biography of a complex man and Sturgis combines the right amount of information, anecdote and personal recollection to paint a very honest portrait of a flawed man.