Sickert
THE intelligence of Walter Richard Sicken, like his other talents, was lively and deep, as everyone who reads about painting or looks at it knows ; few to equal it have been devoted to the art in England for a long time. Here is the bulk of his writing over a period of about thirty years, usefully arranged end edited. The book needs no other recommendation. It is true that the gaudier attractions of art publishing are mercifully absent, and only those who are seriously interested are likely to read this substantial and entertaining volume from end to end. But they, although they may regret that there was no room for one or two of the lectures, such lectures as will never be heard again, have permanent reason to be grateful. An indis- pensable service has been done in admirable, exemplary fashion, and with precisely the appropriate picturesque flourish.
It must be agreed that the views of a painter are rarely of much use to anyone but himself. The sensitive and judicial opinions with which the critic is expected to equip himself are not for him. He accumulates a protective layer of ingenious, subtle wrong-headedness, sets his enemies at naught and works in peace. The logic of his views is unarguable but inextricable. Only the miracle, the produc- tion of good pictures, can if it happens lend them a kind of truth. In Sickert's writings there is some material for the historian. A few of the labels that he applied have stuck. His appreciation of the post-Whistlerian situation is classic and final. But the study for which this book is of capital importance is the study of Sickert himself.
It is a surprise, at first sight, that the author of such glittering splendours of pigment should reveal in almost every page a distaste for the spontaneous manipulation of oil paint. In Whistler's studio he, Sickert, had observed the all-justifying moment of painterly con- summation become so precious, so much more attenuated in each of the endless rehearsals and finally so painfully rare, that the medium itself was near to death from exhaustion. He never forgot the lesson, but it is likely that it no more than confirmed a deeper personal preference. His taste for the "kind of ordered and conscious accomplishment " which he delighted to discover in Lord Leighton, his conception of painting " brought about by conscious stages, each so planned as to form a steady progression to a foreseen end," covered a mistrust of the involuntary and the uncontrollable. In his painting such hazards were excluded from his practice ; all his ex- quisite understanding of the medium was directed to making sure that its ultimate treacherous depths of revelation should never yawn for him. Much of Sickert's writing was an attempt to hide from himself that any part of the glory of the art is owed to men whose prime experiences, the meditative moments of insight, came to them in the act of painting from nature. Millet had to hide Courbet, Constable disappeared behind Turner, the names of Rubens and Tintoretto each became for him a venerated and indispensable talisman against the way of Rembrandt and Titian and Cezanne. Round the empirical method he imagined a pit of hair-raising and largely illusory technical t1angers ; for Whistler he foresaw "a fatal lowering of tone" and made the strangely imaginary discovery that " owing to the tragic slowness of Cezanne's procedure he was practic- ally limited to grey effects." He echoed Gerome, " Ce n'est pas si difficile que ca." -" The difficulty is not so much to paint a good picture as to do a good drawing."
His reputation for perversity is misplaced. The whole structure of Sickert's thought, the protective urbanity, the genially outrageous special pleading, was designed to guard something fragile and elusive, the precious germ, the feeling and the line which were the nucleus of his work. Round it, rediscovering and reconstructing, marrying the enigmas of memory to the particularity of life, he built his characteristic world. We are now familiar with it. The light is patterned in the shapes of lace and venetian blind. Brass catches it, a bed, unmade, and beyond it stencils itself against the washstand. In the shadow the mirror, a wardrobe door that will creak hollowly, gathers its remnants and distributes them, aqueous and dim, on papered walls. Here the inhabitants, barely extricable, encrusted with the green corrosion of the place, have their existence, closeted together, imposing their torpid presences upon one another, enduring amiably the endless afternoon. And here he draws them. A man leaning against the mantelshelf, " with his head slightly raised, half in pleasure at the sunshine, and half in a certain inspiration he gets from the memory of a quite trivial incident he is recalling, with an emphasis that makes it important to him, has got to be drawn. He has got to be drawn. It is a few minutes to five and the Ides of March. He has got to be drawn, not only before the sun sets behind the houses of Stanhope Street and puts a cold extinguisher of lead on the whole scene, but long before that... . If the painter is tactful.
• . . . I give them twenty to twenty-five minutes."
In the drawings (there are one or two of the best among the number reproduced in this book) Sicker's contribution rests. He was not a facile draughtsman ; the handwriting grapples almost clumsily with its message in a hurry to catch the post. In the haste of its description the intractable complication regains a quality of simplicity ; newly found it takes on a freshness never to be forgotten. On the paper the moment remains for ever ; the pictures are ex- tensions of it, scholarly, efficient, lovely. But the drawings form one of the greater monuments of English art. And in Sickert's writings we have, sometimes of a most moving directness, documents for the
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