Born in 1830, Nelly was the illegitimate daughter of a beautiful Irish dancer who had no interest in being a mother. She neglected Nelly, she was a heavy drinker, and finally she ran off to Australia to get married when Nelly was twelve. It was at this juncture in Nelly's life that she suddenly found herself in the guardianship of a wealthy anonymous bachelor who sent her to a school in Neuville-les-Dieppe, on the English Channel in northern France. Over the next six years, he wrote her affectionate letters he cryptically signed "R."
When Nelly turned eighteen and at last met her guardian, he revealed himself as Richard Sheepshanks, a former ordained priest turned much-acclaimed astronomer. He was witty and dashing - everything a young woman might conjure up in her dreams - and she was intelligent and very pretty. Sheepshanks spoiled Nelly and adored her even more than she adored him. He connected her with the right people and placed her in the proper settings. Soon she found herself going to parties, the theater, and the opera, and traveling abroad. She learned several foreign languages, and developed into a cultured young woman, all under the watchful eye of her fairy-tale, doting benefactor, who at some point finally confessed to her that he was her biological father.
Sheepshanks made Nelly promise to destroy all of his letters to her, and it isn't possible to determine whether his love as a father skirted the passion of a lover. Perhaps she knew very well what he was feeling and chose to deny it, or she could have been trusting and naive. But it must have been a shocking moment for him when Nelly joyfully announced in Paris that she was in love and was engaged to be married to an art student named Oswald Sickert.
Her father's reaction was an outburst of rage. He wildly accused her of being ungrateful, dishonest, and unfaithful, and he demanded that she break off the engagement immediately. Nelly refused. Her father withdrew his generosity and returned to England. He wrote several bitter letters to her and then died suddenly after a stroke. Nelly never got over his death and blamed herself for it. She destroyed all of his letters except one that she hid inside an old chronometer of his. "Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you," he had written.
Richard Sheepshanks left nothing to Nelly. Fortunately, his kind sister, Anne Sheepshanks, came to Nelly's rescue and gave her a generous allowance that made it possible for her to support a husband and six children. Nelly's desolate childhood and ultimate betrayal and abandonment by her father would surely have left their scars. Although there is no record of how she felt about her irresponsible dance-hall mother or the seemingly incestuous love of a father who had been little more than a romantic secret most of her young life, one assumes that Nelly would have suffered from deeply felt grief, anger, and shame.
Had Helena Sickert not grown up to be a famous suffragette and political figure who wrote her memoirs, it is safe to say that there would be very little to tell us about the Sickert family and what Walter was like as a boy. Almost every published reference to Walter's early life can be traced back to Helena's memoirs. If any other family member left a record, either it no longer exists or it is safely locked up somewhere.
Helena's description of her mother reveals an intelligent, complex woman who could be fun, charming, and independent and at other times strict, emotionally absent, manipulative, and submissive.
The home Nelly made for her family was an inconsistent one - severe and harsh, then suddenly blooming into games and song. In the evenings, Nelly often sang while Oswald accompanied her on the piano. She sang when she was at her needlework and when she took her children for romps in the woods or to swim. She taught them delightful nonsense songs such as "The Mistletoe Bough" and "She Wore a Wreath of Roses" and the children's favorite:
I am Jack Jumper the youngest but one
I can play nick-nacks upon my own thumb…
From an early age, Walter was a fearless swimmer with a head full of pictures and music. He was blue-eyed with long blond curls, and his mother used to dress him in "Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet suits," recalled a family friend. Helena, four years younger than Walter, remembers her mother's endless praises of his "beauty" and "perfect behavior," the latter of which did not quite mirror his sister's view. Walter may have been lovely to look at, but he was anything but gentle or sweet. Helena recollected that he was a charming, energetic, and quarrelsome little boy who made friends on command but was indifferent to them once they no longer amused him or served a useful purpose. His mother often found herself having to console Walter's abandoned playmates and make feeble excuses for her son's suddenly vanishing from their lives.
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
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.