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 – & judging as far as he could of his character from his face & 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 &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-SEVEN
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.