Walter’s coldness and self-absorption were obvious at a young age, and one suspects that his mother never considered that her relationship with him might have been a contributing factor to the darkening shades of his character. Nelly may have adored her angelic-looking son, but not necessarily for healthy reasons. It’s possible that he was nothing more than an extension of her own ego, and that her doting behavior was a projection of her own deeply rooted and unrequited needs. She probably treated him the only way she knew how, which was to disconnect from him emotionally the way her mother had from her, and to feel for him the selfish and inappropriate intensity that she had experienced from her father. When Walter was a toddler, an artist named Fuseli insisted on painting the “glorious” little boy. Nelly kept the life-size portrait hanging in her sitting room until the day she died at the age of ninety-two.
Oswald Sickert’s pretense that he was head of the household was a fraud, and Walter must have known it. A ritual the children witnessed all too often was “Mummy” begging her husband for money while he dug in his purse and demanded, “How much must I give you, extravagant woman?”
“Will fifteen shillings be too much?” she would ask after going down the list of all their household needs.
Oswald would then magnanimously give her money that was hers to begin with, for she diligently turned over her yearly allowance to him. His scripted generosity was always rewarded with his wife’s kisses and expressions of delight, their playacting weirdly re-creating the relationship between her and her omnipotent, controlling father, Richard Sheepshanks. Walter learned his parents’ drama by heart. He would adopt the worst traits of his father and forever seek out women who would pander to his megalomania and every need.
Oswald Sickert was an artist for the humorous German journal Die Fliegende Blatter, but there was nothing funny about him at home. He had no patience with children and bonded with none of his own. His daughter, Helena, recalls that he talked only to Walter, who would later claim that he remembered “everything” his father ever told him. There wasn’t much that Walter didn’t learn quickly and remember precisely. As a child in Germany, he taught himself to read and write, and throughout his life his acquaintances would marvel at his photographic recall.
Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son’s attention to a memorial. “There’s a name you will never remember,” Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read
MAHARAJA MEERZARAM
GUAHAHAPAJE RAZ
PAREA MANERAMAPAM
MUCHER
L.C.S.K.
When he was eighty years old, Walter Sickert could still recall the inscription and write it without error.
Oswald did not encourage any of his children to pursue art, but from an early age, Walter could not resist drawing, painting, and making models out of wax. Sickert would claim that what he knew of art theory he had learned from his father, who in the 1870s used to take him to the Royal Academy at Burlington House to study the paintings of the “Old Masters.” Searches through collections of Sickert archives suggest that Oswald may have had a hand in Walter’s development as a draftsman as well. In Islington Public Libraries in north London, there is a collection of sketches that have been attributed to Oswald but are now believed by historians and art experts to include sketches made by the father’s talented son, Walter. It is possible that Oswald critiqued Walter’s early artistic efforts.
Many of the drawings are clearly the efforts of the tentative but gifted hand of someone learning to sketch street scenes, buildings, and figures. But the creative mind guiding the hand is disturbed, violent, and morbid, a mind that takes delight in conjuring up a cauldron of men being boiled alive and demonic characters with long, pointed faces, tails, and evil smiles. A favorite theme is that of soldiers storming castles and battling one another. A knight abducts a buxom maiden and rides off with her as she pleads not to be raped or murdered or both. Sickert could have been describing his own juvenilia when he described an etching made by Karel du Jardin in 1652: It is, he said, a ghastly scene of a “cavalier” on horseback pausing to look at a “stripped” and “hacked” up “corpse,” while troops “with spears and pennants” ride off in the distance.