It was her nature to blame herself for whatever went wrong in the Cobden family or her marriage. No matter how often Sickert betrayed her, lied to her, abandoned her, made her feel unloved or invisible, she was loyal and would do anything she could for him. His happiness and health mattered to her, even after they were divorced and he married somebody else. Emotionally and financially, Sickert bled Ellen Cobden to death.
Not long before Ellen died, she wrote Janie, “If only you knew how much I long to go to sleep for good & all. I have been a troublesome sister in many ways. There is a strain of waywardness in my character which has neutralized other qualities which should have helped me thru life.”
Janie didn’t blame Ellen. She blamed Sickert. She had formed her own silent opinion of him early on, and began to encourage Ellen to go on trips and stay at the family estate in Sussex or at the Unwins’ apartment at 10 Hereford Square, in London. Janie’s biting observations about Sickert would not become blatant until Ellen had finally decided to separate from him in September 1896. Then Janie forcefully spoke her mind. She was infuriated by Sickert’s ability to fool other people, particularly his artist friends. They “have quite an exalted idea of his character,” she wrote to Ellen on July 24, 1899, days before Ellen and Sickert’s divorce was final. “They cannot know what he really is as you do.”
The ever-sensible Janie tried to convince her sister of the truth. “I fear to say that W.S. will never change his conduct of life – and with no guiding principles to keep his emotional nature straight he follows every whim that takes his fancy – you have tried so often to trust him, and he has deceived you times without number.” But nothing dissuaded Ellen from loving Walter Sickert and believing he would change.
Ellen was a gentle, needy woman. Her childhood letters reveal a “daddy’s girl” whose entire existence was about being his daughter. Ellen politicked, said and did the right things, was always appropriate, and carried on her father’s missions as much as her limited strength and courage would allow. She could not see a stray or injured animal without trying ed f W to rescue it, and even as a small child she could not bear it when the lambs
were herded away for slaughter and the mother sheep bleated plaintively in the fields. Ellen had rabbits, dogs, cats, goldfinches, parakeets, ponies, donkeys – whatever came into her kind and sensitive hands.
She deeply cared about the poor and campaigned for free trade and home rule for Ireland almost as tirelessly as Janie did. Over time, Ellen became too worn down to accompany her words with her feet. While Janie would move on to become one of the most prominent women suffragettes in Great Britain, Ellen would drift deeper into depression, illness, and fatigue. Yet in the hundreds of surviving letters Ellen wrote during her relatively short life, she does not lament the social plight of the Unfortunates her husband brought into his studios to sketch and paint. She did nothing to better the lives of those women or their pitiful children.
The suffering remnants of humanity, adult or child, were for Sickert to use or abuse as he pleased. Perhaps his wife did not want to see the music-hall stars who posed for him in the upstairs studio at 54 Broadhurst Gardens or later in Chelsea. Perhaps she could not bear to see any child or childlike person her husband may have been interested in just a bit too much. Sickert watched little girls dance in sexually provocative ways in the music halls. He met them backstage. He painted them. Much later in life, when Sickert became obsessed with the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, he asked her in a letter if she had any photographs of herself “as a child.”
Ellen and Sickert would have no children. There is no real evidence Sickert ever had children, although a story has persisted that he had an illegitimate son by Madame Villain, a French fishwife he stayed with in Dieppe after his separation from Ellen. In a letter, Sickert refers to Madame Villain as a mother figure who took care of him at a low point in his life. This does not mean he did not have sex with her, assuming he could. The supposed illegitimate child’s name was Maurice, and Sickert would have nothing to do with him, so the story goes. Madame Villain was said to have had many children by many different men.