At one point in his life, his friends had to raise sufficient funds to save the family home. His financial failings were not the result of irresponsibility but were a symptom of his driving sense of mission and idealism. Cobden was not a spendthrift. He simply had loftier matters on his mind, and this may have impressed his daughter Ellen as a noble flaw rather than a blameworthy one. Perhaps it was fortuitous that in 1880, the year Sickert first met Ellen, John Morley’s long-awaited two-volume biography of Cobden was published.
If Sickert read Morley’s work, he could have known enough about Cobden to script a very persuasive role for himself and easily convince Ellen that he and the famous politician shared some of the same traits: a love of the theater and literature, an attachment to all things French, and a higher calling that was not about money. Sickert might even have convinced Ellen that he was an advocate of women’s suffrage.
“I shall reluctantly have to support a bitches suffrage bill,” Sickert would complain some thirty-five years later. “But you are to understand I shall not by this become a ‘feminist.’ ”
Richard Cobden believed in the equality of the sexes. He treated his daughters with respect and affection—and never as witless brood mares good for nothing but marriage and childbearing. He would have applauded the political activism of his daughters as they matured. The 1880s were a time of foment for females as they formed purity and political leagues that lobbied for contraception, reforms to help the poor, and the right to vote and to have representation in Parliament. Feminists such as the Cobden daughters wanted to enjoy the same human dignity as men, and that meant quashing entertainment and vices that promoted the enslavement of women, such as prostitution and the lasciviousness of London’s many music halls.
Sickert must have sensed that Ellen’s life belonged to her father. There was nothing she would do to smear his name. When she and Sickert divorced, Janie’s prominent publisher husband, Fisher Unwin, contacted the chief editors of London’s major newspapers and requested that they print “nothing of a personal nature” in their papers. “Certainly,” he insisted, “the family name should not appear.” Any secret that might have hurt Richard Cobden was safe with Ellen, and we will never know how many secrets she took to her grave. For Richard Cobden, the great protector of the poor, to have a son-in-law who slaughtered the poor was inconceivable. The question may always be whether Ellen knew that Walter had a dark side “From Hell,” to quote a phrase the Ripper used in several of his letters.
It is possible that at some point and on some level Ellen suspected the truth about her husband. Despite her liberal stance in regard to women’s suffrage, Ellen was weak in body and spirit. Her increasingly friable fabric may have been the result of a genetic trait she shared with her mother, but Ellen might also have been damaged by the torment her well-meaning father put her through because of his own desperate needs. She could not live up to his expectations. In her own eyes, she was a failure long before she and Walter Sickert met.
It was her nature to blame herself for whatever went wrong in the Cobden family or her marriage. No matter how often Sickert betrayed her, lied to her, abandoned her, made her feel unloved or invisible, she was loyal and would do anything she could for him. His happiness and health mattered to her, even after they were divorced and he married somebody else. Emotionally and financially, Sickert bled Ellen Cobden to death.
Not long before Ellen died, she wrote Janie, “If only you knew how much I long to go to sleep for good & all. I have been a troublesome sister in many ways. There is a strain of waywardness in my character which has neutralized other qualities which should have helped me thru life.”
Janie didn’t blame Ellen. She blamed Sickert. She had formed her own silent opinion of him early on, and began to encourage Ellen to go on trips and stay at the family estate in Sussex or at the Unwins’ apartment at 10 Hereford Square, in London. Janie’s biting observations about Sickert would not become blatant until Ellen had finally decided to separate from him in September 1896. Then Janie forcefully spoke her mind. She was infuriated by Sickert’s ability to fool other people, particularly his artist friends. They “have quite an exalted idea of his character,” she wrote to Ellen on July 24, 1899, days before Ellen and Sickert’s divorce was final. “They cannot know what he really is as you do.”
The ever-sensible Janie tried to convince her sister of the truth. “I fear to say that W.S. will never change his conduct of life—and with no guiding principles to keep his emotional nature straight he follows every whim that takes his fancy—you have tried so often to trust him, and he has deceived you times without number.” But nothing dissuaded Ellen from loving Walter Sickert and believing he would change.
Ellen was a gentle, needy woman. Her childhood letters reveal a “daddy’s girl” whose entire existence was about being his daughter. Ellen politicked, said and did the right things, was always appropriate, and carried on her father’s missions as much as her limited strength and courage would allow. She could not see a stray or injured animal without trying to rescue it, and even as a small child she could not bear it when the lambs were herded away for slaughter and the mother sheep bleated plaintively in the fields. Ellen had rabbits, dogs, cats, goldfinches, parakeets, ponies, donkeys—whatever came into her kind and sensitive hands.
She deeply cared about the poor and campaigned for free trade and home rule for Ireland almost as tirelessly as Janie did. Over time, Ellen became too worn down to accompany her words with her feet. While Janie would move on to become one of the most prominent women suffragettes in Great Britain, Ellen would drift deeper into depression, illness, and fatigue. Yet in the hundreds of surviving letters Ellen wrote during her relatively short life, she does not lament the social plight of the Unfortunates her husband brought into his studios to sketch and paint. She did nothing to better the lives of those women or their pitiful children.
The suffering remnants of humanity, adult or child, were for Sickert to use or abuse as he pleased. Perhaps his wife did not want to see the music-hall stars who posed for him in the upstairs studio at 54 Broadhurst Gardens or later in Chelsea. Perhaps she could not bear to see any child or childlike person her husband may have been interested in just a bit too much. Sickert watched little girls dance in sexually provocative ways in the music halls. He met them backstage. He painted them. Much later in life, when Sickert became obsessed with the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, he asked her in a letter if she had any photographs of herself “as a child.”
Ellen and Sickert would have no children. There is no real evidence that Sickert ever had children, although a story has persisted that he had an illegitimate son by Madame Villain, the French fishwife he stayed with in Dieppe after his separation from Ellen. In a letter, Sickert refers to Madame Villain as a mother figure who took care of him at a low point in his life. This does not mean he did not have sex with her, assuming he could. The supposed illegitimate child’s name was Maurice, and Sickert would have nothing to do with him, so the story goes. Madame Villain was said to have had many children by many different men.
In a July 20, 1902, letter from Jacques-Emile Blanche to novelist André Gide, Blanche says that Sickert’s “life more and more defies everyone . . . . This immoralist has ended up living alone in a large house in a working class suburb so that he doesn’t have to do anything regarded as normal and can do what ever he likes whenever he likes. He does this without a sou having a legitimate family in England and a fishwife in Dieppe, with a swarm of children of provenances which are not possible to count.”
Devoted friend and fellow artist Ciceley Hey, however, had a very different opinion of Sickert the “immoralist.” In a letter she wrote to a Mr. Wodeson on February 5, 1973, she refers to having spent ten years and “many long hours with [Sickert] alone” in his studios. The accusations that he spent his “life chasing [sic] after women” and had fathered “innumerable illegitimate children” clearly caused her great indignation. Ms. Hey doesn’t directly address Sicke
rt’s alleged sexual indiscretions. Certainly, she says nothing to validate his sexual exploits, which by the time she met him had become legendary (a legend most likely created by Sickert, who was said to boast that as a boy he lost his virginity to a milkmaid). Ms. Hey never indicates that Sickert made any sexual advances toward her during their countless hours alone, and she states emphatically that he “had never had any children and that he had told me that himself.”
The medical implications of Sickert’s early surgeries would suggest he was unable to father children, but without medical records all one can do is speculate. He would not have wanted to bother with children, even if he could have fathered them, and Ellen probably wouldn’t have wanted them, either. She was almost thirty-seven and he was twenty-five when, after a four-year engagement, they married at the Marylebone Registry Office on June 10, 1885. He was starting his career and did not want children, says his nephew John Lessore, and Ellen was getting a bit old to have them.
She may also have been an advocate of the Purity League, which encouraged women not to engage in intercourse. Sex was what held women back and victimized them. Ellen and Janie were both ardent feminists, and Janie had no children, either, for reasons not clear. Both women were in agreement with the Malthusians, who used Thomas Malthus’s essay on population as the basis for promoting contraception—even if the Reverend Malthus himself was actually opposed to contraception.
Ellen’s diaries and correspondence reveal an intelligent, socially sophisticated, decent woman who was idealistic about love. She was also very careful. Or someone was. Over the thirty-four years she knew and loved Walter Sickert, she mentions him very few times. Janie mentions him more often, but not with the frequency one might expect from a thoughtful woman who should have cared about her sister’s spouse. Gaps in the some four hundred existing letters and notes the sisters wrote to each other suggest that much of their correspondence has vanished. I found only thirty-some letters from 1880 to 1889, which is puzzling. During this decade Ellen got engaged to Sickert and they were married.
I found not a single allusion to Ellen’s wedding, and based on the list of witnesses on the marriage certificate, no one in her family or Sickert’s was present at the Registry Office, a very odd place for a first marriage in those days, especially when the bride was the daughter of Richard Cobden. There does not appear to be a single letter from Ellen when she was on her honeymoon in Europe, and in no archival source did I discover correspondence between Ellen and Sickert or between Ellen and Sickert’s family or between Sickert and his family or between Sickert and the Cobden family.
If such letters existed, possibly they were destroyed or have been kept out of public circulation. I find it strange that a husband and wife apparently did not write or telegraph each other when they were apart, which was more often than not. I find it significant that the legacy-minded Ellen apparently did not preserve letters from Sickert when she believed in his genius and that he was destined to become an important artist.
“I know how good it is,” Ellen writes of Sickert’s art. “I have always known,” she wrote Blanche.
By 1881, the young, beautiful, blue-eyed Walter had attached himself to a woman whose yearly stipend was as much as £250—more than what some young physicians earned then. There was no reason why Sickert shouldn’t enroll in the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. The 1881 Slade syllabus indicates courses strong in the sciences: antique and life classes, etching, sculpture, archaeology, perspective, chemistry of materials used in painting, and anatomy. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there were lectures that focused on “the bones, joints and muscles.”
During Sickert’s time at the Slade he became friendly with Whistler, but how they actually met is hazy. One story is that Sickert and Whistler were in the audience at the Lyceum while Ellen Terry was performing. During the curtain call, Sickert hurled roses weighted with lead onto the stage and the fragrant missile almost hit Henry Irving, who was not amused. Whistler’s infamous “ha ha!” could be heard in the crowd. As the audience was filing out, Whistler made a point of meeting the audacious young man.
Other accounts suggest that Sickert “ran into” Whistler somewhere or followed him into a shop or met him at a party or through the Cobden daughters. Sickert was never accused of being shy or reticent about whatever it was he wanted at the moment. Whistler supposedly persuaded Sickert to stop wasting his time with art school and come to work in a real studio with him. The young man left the Slade School and became Whistler’s apprentice. He worked side by side with the Master, but what his days with Ellen were like is a blank.
Available references to the early years of Ellen and Walter’s marriage do not indicate an attraction to each other or the slightest fragrant scent of romance. In Jacques-Emile Blanche’s memoirs, he refers to Ellen as so much older than Sickert that she “might have been taken for his elder sister.” He thought the couple were well matched “intellectually” and observed that they allowed each other “perfect freedom.” During visits to Blanche in Dieppe, Sickert paid little attention to Ellen, but would disappear in the narrow streets and courtyards, and into his rented “mysterious rooms in harbour quarters, sheds from which all were excluded.”
The divorce decree cites that Sickert was guilty of “adultery coupled with desertion for the space of 2 years & upwards without reasonable excuse.” Yet it was really Ellen who eventually refused to live with Sickert. And there is no evidence he had even one sexual transgression. Ellen’s divorce petition states that Sickert deserted her on September 29, 1896, and that on or about April 21, 1898, he committed adultery with a woman whose name was “unknown” to Ellen. This alleged tryst supposedly occurred at the Midland Grand Hotel in London. Then, on May 4, 1899, Sickert supposedly committed adultery again with a woman whose name also was “unknown” to Ellen.
Various biographers explain that the reason the couple separated on September 29th is that on this day Sickert admitted to Ellen that he wasn’t faithful to her and never had been. If so, it would appear that his affairs—assuming he had more than the two mentioned in the divorce decree—were with “unknown” women. Nothing I have read would indicate that he was amorous toward women or given to inappropriate touching or invitations—even if he did use vulgar language. Fellow artist Nina Hamnett, a notorious bohemian who rarely turned down liquor or sex, writes in her autobiography that Sickert would walk her home when she was drunk; she stayed with him in France. The kiss-and-tell Nina says not a word about Sickert ever so much as flirting with her.
Ellen may really have believed Sickert was a womanizer, or her claims may have been something of a red herring if the humiliating truth was that they never consummated their marriage. In the late nineteenth century, a woman had no legal grounds to leave her husband unless he was unfaithful and cruel or deserted her. She and Sickert agreed to these claims. He did not fight her. One would assume she knew about his damaged penis, but it is possible the brotherly and sisterly couple never undressed around each other or attempted sex.
During their divorce proceedings, Ellen wrote that Sickert promised if she would “give him one more chance he [would] be a different man, that I am the only person he has ever really cared for—that he has no longer those relations with [unknown].” Ellen’s lawyer, she wrote, felt certain Sickert was “sincere—but that taking into consideration his previous life—& judging as far as he could of his character from his face & manner he does not believe he is capable of keeping any resolve that he made, and his deliberate advice to me is to go on with the divorce.
“I am dreadfully upset & have hardly done anything but cry ever since,” Ellen wrote Janie. “I see how far from dead is my affection for him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE DARKEST NIGHT IN THE DAY
Sickert’s roles changed like the light and shadow he painted on his canvases.
A shape should not have lines because nature doesn’t, and forms reveal themselves in tones, shades, and the way light ho
lds them. Sickert’s life had no lines or boundaries, and his shape changed with every tilt and touch of his enigmatic moods and hidden purposes.
Those who knew him as well as those he brushed past only now and then accepted that being Sickert meant being the “chameleon,” the “poseur.” He was Sickert in the loud checked coat walking all hours through London’s foreboding alleyways and streets. He was Sickert the farmer or country squire or tramp or bespectacled masher in the bowler hat or dandy in black tie or the eccentric wearing bedroom slippers to meet the train. He was Jack the Ripper with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a red scarf around his neck, working in the gloom of a studio illuminated by the feeble glow from a bull’s-eye lantern.
Victorian writer and critic Clive Bell’s relationship with Sickert was one of mutual love-hate, and Bell quipped that on any given day Sickert might be John Bull, Voltaire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, a cook, a dandy, a swell, a bookmaker, a solicitor. Bell believed that Sickert wasn’t the scholar he was reputed to be and appeared to “know a great deal more than he did,” even if he was the greatest British painter since Constable, Bell observed. But one “could never feel sure that their Sickert was Sickert’s Sickert, or that Sickert’s Sickert corresponded with any ultimate reality.” He was a man of “no standards,” and in Bell’s words, Sickert did not feel “possessively and affectionately about anything which was not part of himself.”
Ellen was part of Sickert’s self. He had use for her. He could not see her as a separate human being because all people and all things were extensions of Sickert. She was still in Ireland with Janie when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows were murdered and when George Lusk, the head of the East End Vigilance Committee, received half of a human kidney by post on October 16th. Almost two weeks later, the curator of the pathology museum of the London Hospital, Dr. Thomas Openshaw, received the letter written on A Pirie & Sons watermarked paper and signed “Jack the ripper.”
Portrait of a Killer Page 35