"The inquiry," Chief Inspector Donald Swanson summarized in his report, "was confined amongst persons of deceased's class in the East End, but without any success."
Chapter Five. A Glorius 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.
Oswald was always on the move, so much so that one wonders when he got his work done. His walks might consume the better part of the day, or perhaps he was on a train somewhere until late at night. A cursory sampling of his activities reveals a man who could scarcely sit still and constantly did what he pleased. The diary pages are incomplete and undated, but his words portray him as a self-absorbed, moody, restless man.
During one week, on Wednesday, Oswald Sickert traveled by train from Echkenforde to Schleswig to Echen to Flensburg in northern Germany. Thursday, he took a look "at the new road along the railroad" and walked "along the harbor to the Nordertor [North Gate]" and across a field "to the ditch and home." He ate lunch and spent the afternoon at "Notke's beergarden." From there he visited a farm and then went home. Friday: "Went by myself" to visit Allenslob, Nobbe, Jantz, Stropatil, and Moller. He met up with a group of people, ate dinner with them, and at 10:00 P.M. returned home. Saturday: "Went for a walk by myself through the city."
Sunday he was out of the house all day, then he had dinner, and afterward there was music and singing at home until 10:00 P.M. Monday, he walked to Gottorf, then "back across over the property/estates and the peat bog…" Tuesday, he went by horse to Mugner's, fished until 3:00 P.M. and caught "30 perch." He visited with acquaintances at a pub. "Ate and drank" lunch. "Return at 11:00 P.M."
Oswald's writings make it clear he hated authority, particularly police, and his angry, mocking words eerily portend Jack the Ripper's own taunts to the police: "Catch me if you can," the Ripper repeatedly wrote.
" - Hooray! The watchman is asleep!" wrote Walter Sickert's father. "When you see him like that, you wouldn't believe that he is a watchman. Shall I nudge him out of love for humanity and tell him what the bell has tolled [or what trouble he is in for]… O no, let him slumber. Maybe he dreams that he has me, let him hold on to this illusion."
Oswald's sentiments about authority must have been voiced within the walls of his home, and Walter could not have been oblivious to them. Nor could he or his mother have been unaware of Oswald's frequent visits to beer gardens and pubs - to his being "plied with punch."
"I have boozed away the money," Oswald wrote. "I owed that much to my stomach. I sleep during my leisure hours, of which I have plenty."
Whatever prompted his obsessive walks, frequent journeys, and regular patronage of pubs and beer gardens, they cost money. And Oswald could not earn a living. Without his wife's money the family would not have survived. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a Punch and Judy script Oswald wrote (probably in the early 1860s), the sadistic puppet-husband Punch is spending the family money on booze and cares nothing for his wife and infant son:…
Punch appears in the box: Ah yes, I believe you don't know me… my name is Punch. This also used to be my father's name, and my grandfather's, too… I like nice clothes. I am married by the way. I have a wife and a child. But that doesn't mean anything…
WIFE (JUDY): No, I can't stand this anymore! Even this early in the morning, this awful man has drunk brandy!… Oh, what an unhappy woman I am. All earnings are spent on spirits. I have no bread for the children -
If Walter Sickert got his carelessness with money and his restlessness from his father, he got his charm and good looks from his mother. He may have been handed a few of her less attractive attributes as well. The story of Mrs. Sickert's bizarre childhood has an uncanny resemblance to Charles Dickens's Bleak House - Walter's favorite novel. In that book, an orphan girl named Esther is mysteriously sent to live in the mansion of the kind and wealthy Mr. Jarndyce, who later wants to marry her.