Ellen's diaries and correspondence reveal an intelligent, socially sophisticated, decent woman who was idealistic about love. She was also very careful. Or someone was. Over the thirty-four years she knew and loved Walter Sickert, she mentions him very few times. Janie mentions him more often, but not with the frequency one might expect from a thoughtful woman who should have cared about her sister's spouse. Gaps in the some four hundred existing letters and notes the sisters wrote to each other suggest that much of their correspondence has vanished. I found only thirty-some letters from 1880 to 1889, which is puzzling. During this decade Ellen got engaged to Sickert and they were married.
I found not a single allusion to Ellen's wedding, and based on the list of witnesses on the marriage certificate, no one in her family or Sickert's was present at the Registry Office, a very odd place for a first marriage in those days, especially when the bride was the daughter of Richard Cobden. There does not appear to be a single letter from Ellen when she was on her honeymoon in Europe, and in no archival source did I discover correspondence between Ellen and Sickert or between Ellen and Sickert's family or between Sickert and his family or between Sickert and the Cobden family.
If such letters existed, possibly they were destroyed or have been kept out of public circulation. I find it strange that a husband and wife apparently did not write or telegraph each other when they were apart, which was more often than not. I find it significant that the legacy-minded Ellen apparently did not preserve letters from Sickert when she believed in his genius and that he was destined to become an important artist.
"I know how good it is," Ellen writes of Sickert's art. "I have always known," she wrote Blanche.
By 1881, the young, beautiful, blue-eyed Walter had attached himself to a woman whose yearly stipend was as much as 250 pounds - more than what some young physicians earned then. There was no reason why Sickert shouldn't enroll in the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. The 1881 Slade syllabus indicates courses strong in the sciences: antique and life classes, etching, sculpture, archaeology, perspective, chemistry of materials used in painting, and anatomy. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there were lectures that focused on "the bones, joints and muscles."
During Sickert's time at the Slade he became friendly with Whistler, but how they actually met is hazy. One story is that Sickert and Whistler were in the audience at the Lyceum while Ellen Terry was performing. During the curtain call, Sickert hurled roses weighted with lead onto the stage and the fragrant missile almost hit Henry Irving, who was not amused. Whistler's infamous "ha ha!" could be heard in the crowd. As the audience was filing out, Whistler made a point of meeting the audacious young man.
Other accounts suggest that Sickert "ran into" Whistler somewhere or followed him into a shop or met him at a party or through the Cobden daughters. Sickert was never accused of being shy or reticent about whatever it was he wanted at the moment. Whistler supposedly persuaded Sickert to stop wasting his time with art school and come to work in a real studio with him. The young man left the Slade School and became Whistler's apprentice. He worked side by side with the Master, but what his days with Ellen were like is a blank.
Available references to the early years of Ellen and Walter's marriage do not indicate an attraction to each other or the slightest fragrant scent of romance. In Jacques-Emile Blanche's memoirs, he refers to Ellen as so much older than Sickert that she "might have been taken for his elder sister." He thought the couple were well matched "intellectually" and observed that they allowed each other "perfect freedom." During visits to Blanche in Dieppe, Sickert paid little attention to Ellen, but would disappear in the narrow streets and courtyards, and into his rented "mysterious rooms in harbour quarters, sheds from which all were excluded."
The divorce decree cites that Sickert was guilty of "adultery coupled with desertion for the space of 2 years 6c upwards without reasonable excuse." Yet it was really Ellen who eventually refused to live with Sickert. And there is no evidence he had even one sexual transgression. Ellen's divorce petition states that Sickert deserted her on September 29, 1896, and that on or about April 21, 1898, he committed adultery with a woman whose name was "unknown" to Ellen. This alleged tryst supposedly occurred at the Midland Grand Hotel in London. Then, on May 4, 1899, Sickert supposedly committed adultery again with a woman whose name also was "unknown" to Ellen.
Various biographers explain that the reason the couple separated on September 29th is that on this day Sickert admitted to Ellen that he wasn't faithful to her and never had been. If so, it would appear that his affairs - assuming he had more than the two mentioned in the divorce decree - were with "unknown" women. Nothing I have read would indicate that he was amorous toward women or given to inappropriate touching or invitations - even if he did use vulgar language. Fellow artist Nina Hamnett, a notorious bohemian who rarely turned down liquor or sex, writes in her autobiography that Sickert would walk her home when she was drunk; she stayed with him in France. The kiss-and-tell Nina says not a word about Sickert ever so much as flirting with her.
Ellen may really have believed Sickert was a womanizer, or her claims may have been something of a red herring if the humiliating truth was that they never consummated their marriage. In the late nineteenth century, a woman had no legal grounds to leave her husband unless he was unfaithful and cruel or deserted her. She and Sickert agreed to these claims. He did not fight her. One would assume she knew about his damaged penis, but it is possible the brotherly and sisterly couple never undressed around each other or attempted sex.
During their divorce proceedings, Ellen wrote that Sickert promised if she would "give him one more chance he [would] be a different man, that I am the only person he has ever really cared for - that he has no longer those relations with [unknown]." Ellen's lawyer, she wrote, felt certain Sickert was "sincere - but that taking into consideration his previous life - amp; judging as far as he could of his character from his face amp; manner he does not believe he is capable of keeping any resolve that he made, and his deliberate advice to me is to go on with the divorce.
"I am dreadfully upset amp;t have hardly done anything but cry ever since," Ellen wrote Janie. "I see how far from dead is my affection for him."
Chapter Twenty-even. The Darkest Night In The Day
Sickert's roles changed like the light and shadow he painted on his canvases.
A shape should not have lines because nature doesn't, and forms reveal themselves in tones, shades, and the way light holds them. Sickert's life had no lines or boundaries, and his shape changed with every tilt and touch of his enigmatic moods and hidden purposes.
Those who knew him as well as those he brushed past only now and then accepted that being Sickert meant being the "chameleon," the "poseur." He was Sickert in the loud checked coat walking all hours through London's foreboding alleyways and streets. He was Sickert the farmer or country squire or tramp or bespectacled masher in the bowler hat or dandy in black tie or the eccentric wearing bedroom slippers to meet the train. He was Jack the Ripper with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a red scarf around his neck, working in the gloom of a studio illuminated by the feeble glow from a bull's-eye lantern.
Victorian writer and critic Clive Bell's relationship with Sickert was one of mutual love-hate, and Bell quipped that on any given day Sickert might be John Bull, Voltaire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, a cook, a dandy, a swell, a bookmaker, a solicitor. Bell believed Sickert wasn't the scholar he was reputed to be and appeared to "know a great deal more than he did," even if he was the greatest British painter since Constable, Bell observed. But one "could never feel sure that their Sickert was Sickert's Sickert, or that Sickert's Sickert corresponded with any ultimate reality." He was a man of "no standards," and in Bell's words, Sickert did not feel "possessively and affectionately about anything which was not part of himself."