CHAPTER FIVE
A GLORIOUS BOY
Walter Richard Sickert was born May 31, 1860, in Munich, Germany.
One of England’s most important artists wasn’t English. The “thoroughly English” Walter, as he was often described, was the son of a thoroughly Danish artist named Oswald Adalbert Sickert and a not-so-thoroughly English-Irish beauty named Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry. As a child, Walter was thoroughly German.
Sickert’s mother was called “Nelly”; his younger sister, Helena, was called “Nellie”; and Sickert’s first wife, Ellen Cobden, was called “Nelly.” Ellen Terry was called “Nelly.” For purposes of clarity, I will not use the name “Nelly” except when referring to Sickert’s mother, and I will resist giving in to the temptation to resort to Oedipal psychobabble because the four strongest women in Sickert’s life had the same nickname.
Walter was the firstborn of six children – five boys and one girl. Remarkably, it appears that not one of them would ever have children.
Each child apparently had a curdled chemistry, except, perhaps, Oswald Valentine, a successful salesman about whom, it seems, nothing else is known. Robert would become a recluse and die from injuries sustained when he was hit by a lorry. Leonard always seemed strangely detached from reality and would die after a long battle with substance abuse. Bernhard was a failed painter and suffered from depression and alcoholism. A poetic observation their father, Oswald, wrote seems tragically prophetic:
Where there is freedom, there, of course,
the bad thing has to be free, too, but it dies,
since it carries the germ of destruction within
itself and dies of its own consequence/logicality.
The Sickerts’ only daughter, Helena, had a brilliant mind and a fiery spirit, but a body that failed her all of her life. She was the only member of the family who seemed interested in humanitarian causes and other people. She would explain in her autobiography that early suffering made her compassionate and gave her sensitivity toward others. She was sent off to a harsh boarding school where she ate terrible food and was humiliated by the other girls because she was sickly and clumsy. The males in her home made her believe she was ugly. She was inferior because she wasn’t a boy.
Walter was the third generation of artists. His grandfather, Johann Jurgen Sickert, was so gifted as a painter that he earned the patronage of Denmark’s King Christian VIII. Walter’s father, Oswald, was a talented painter and graphic artist who could make neither a name for himself nor a living. An old photograph shows him with a long bushy beard and cold eyes that glint of anger. Along with most of the Sickert family, details about him have faded like a poorly made daguerreotype. A search of records came up with a small collection of his writings and art that are included with his son’s papers at Islington Public Libraries. Oswald’s handwritten high German had to be translated into low German and then English, a process that took about six months and produced only sixty fragments of pages because most of what he wrote was impossible to read and could not be deciphered at all.
But what could be made out gave me a glimpse of an extraordinarily strong-willed, complex, and talented man who wrote music, plays, and poetry. His gift of words and his theatrical flair made him a favorite for giving speeches at weddings, carnivals, and other social events. He was active politically during the Danish-German War of 1864 and traveled quite a lot to different cities, encouraging the working men to pull together for a united Germany.
“I want your help,” he said in one undated speech. “Everyone of you needs to do his share…. It is also up to those of you who deal with the workers, to the larger tradesmen, factory owners, among you, it is up to you to care for the honest worker.” Oswald could rouse the spirits of the oppressed. He could also compose beautiful music and poetic verses full of tenderness and love. He could create cartoonlike artwork that reveals a cruel and fiendish sense of fun. Pages of his diaries show that when Oswald wasn’t sketching, he was wandering, a practice imitated by his eldest son.