Biography Walter Richard Sickert was "intelligent, worldly, shrewd and witty" in the words of a fellow artist. And that is precisely what this thumping great biography is: what "A Life".
And what a life Sturgis chronicles with fluency, authority, and a hugely impressive framework of research. Sickert was the eldest son of a Danish father and an English, French-educated mother, and raised in Munich where, with prescience, Sturgis writes, the headstrong "Walter was a fickle leader [of his siblings] with no sense of responsibility to his followers. His restless intelligence needed the stimulation of constant change". Story of his life, really.
The family moved to London in 1866, when Walter was six. His father was an artist, and Sickert's "abiding pleasure throughout his schooldays was drawing and painting". He later remarked: "It is natural to all ages to like the narrative picture, and I fancy that, if we spoke the truth . . . that we liked at first the narrative picture in proportion that it can be said to be lurid".
His "creed of the real", with the lurid much to the fore, was to rule much of his life, in his choice of subjects, his language, and his teaching, all served up with a spice of exaggeration, and delivered with mercurial brilliance. He was the master of the misshapen nude, the iron bedstead, the darkened alleyway.
Sturgis takes such crucial themes and shows, decade by decade, how they developed. Sickert's hero-worship of the artistry of Charles Keene, for instance, who was one of the leading draughtsmen on Punch, but pooh-poohed by the art world as a hack cartoonist:
"His assured but loosely executed cartoons captured the vital flavours of Victorian popular life with unrivalled brio. Better than any of his contemporaries, it was said, he could 'emphasize the absurdity of a City man's hat', suggest the 'twist of a drunkard's coat', or 'an old lady's bombazeen about to pop'. And he did it with a delicacy that often left the viewer in some doubt as to whether it was caricature at all. Keene became Sickert's first artistic hero".
His admiration for Keene led Sickert back to Leech, Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Hogarth, the vigorous tradition of 18th- and 19th-century English graphic art, with its abiding delight in "low life" subjects and suggestive narratives. Later in his life, Sickert was to write: "London is spiffing! Such evil racy faces & such a comfortable feeling of a solid basis of beef & beer. O the whiff of leather & stout from the swing-doors of the pubs! Why aren't I Keats to sing them?" Keene, Leech and Hogarth, not to mention Phil May and George Belcher, would have joined the chorus.
After schooling, a stage-struck Sickert trod the boards, spear-carrying in Henry Irving's company - he always networked well. Maybe a flair for the dramatic was in his blood: his mother was the illegitimate daughter of the Rev Richard Sheepshanks, "greatly respected in scientific circles", and Eleanor Henry, of whom "very little is known at all, except that she was Irish, fair-haired and handsome, and was a dancer on the London stage".
The indubitably handsome Sickert came to know Ellen Terry, and Sturgis writes impishly, "Walter developed a crush on her which she graciously indulged".
Then, through stage contacts, he pressed himself into a sort of studentship-servitude with that arch-dandy James McNeill Whistler, a connection which was to last 19 years until Whistler ended it with "distilled vitriol".
It was on an errand for Whistler that Sickert met his greatest mentor: Edgar Degas. In and out of Sickert's life the great man appears, dispensing bonhomie, wit and wisdom. Wit (on Whistler): "The role of the butterfly must be pretty tiring. Me, I prefer to be the old ox". Wisdom: he raised doubts about the Whistlerian absence of detail and human interest in Sickert's pictures, and the fondness for low tones.
Looking at some of Sickert's pictures he remarked: "It all seems a bit like something taking place at night".
This use of low tones is a familiar charge against Sickert (indeed, it's the reason why my own family cannot for the life of them understand my lifetime's hero-worship of the man). A housekeeper of his used to refer to his work as "London Mud". And a teenage Clementine Hozier (who became Mrs Winston Churchill) was taxed by Sickert with not liking his pictures. She explained: "Well, Mr Sickert, you seem to see everything through dirty eyes."
Low tones there were a-plenty in what has become Sickert's most famous theme: the music hall. Degas had been insistent that English artists should seek English sources of inspiration, and in the 1880s the music halls were vulgar, daring and distinctly British. Off Sickert went to "the 'alls", and struck gold. Sturgis writes: "Sickert found a rich pictorial drama in the low tones of the auditorium, the garish light of the stage, but it appealed too because it was both daring and untapped. It was a chance to stake a claim on something new - and something that was likely to shock".
Ah, the shocking Sickert. He was at it all his life, in his work, his words, his teaching, his behaviour. Sturgis leads us through the merry dance Sickert led his three wives: "I play at love like a quadrille," he said, "and that is all I am good for."
In 1899 in Dieppe, just divorced, he wrote: "Nobody here to talk art & fucking with."
But the wit was never far away, even in the bedroom. Nina Hamnett - "quick, amusing, amoral, fond of drink and keen on sex" - told Sickert that she had discovered that Rimbaud and Verlaine had lodged in the same London building in which she had lost her virginity. She asked Sickert excitedly: "Do you think they will put up a blue plaque on the house for me or will they put one up for Verlaine and Rimbaud?" To which he replied: "My dear, they will put one on the front for you and one on the back for them."
And was Sickert Jack the Ripper? In a terse 17-page 'Postcript - Walter Sickert: Case Closed', Sturgis moves precisely through Patricia Cornwell's charges, and refutes them all. Best to read the postscript first, get it out of the way, then start enjoying this full, frank and fair book.
Sickert's later life as an independent maverick away from all the artists' groups, cliques and sets that he had joined, formed and led, saw him pioneering the use of photography in painting, and lightening his palette at last. "Artists must use the camera," he urged.
He remained an iconoclast to the end, "essentially unchanged in his egoism, his charm, his vitality, his sympathy for youth, his lack of cynicism, his deep seriousness about painting, and his deep unseriousness about everything else".
A massive survey exhibition of Sickert's work was running at London's National Gallery during his last illness of 1941-42. A critic summed up the general opinion, describing it as "worthy of the great artist it reveals", and remarking how through all the different phases of his art, in Dieppe, Paris, Venice and London, "his gusto and curiosity hold sway".
He was his own man, was Walter. This biography, written with precision, insight and gusto, is well worthy of him.
Andy Barclay is a journalist. He is working on a study of Irish singers and songs in Victorian and Edwardian music hall.
Walter Sickert: A Life By Matthew Sturgis HarperCollins, 768pp. £30