Being the writings of WALTER RICHARD SICKERT. Edited by OSBERT SITWELL. First published by Macmillan & C0 Ltd of London in 1947
Reviewed by Clifford Hall
Clifford Hall wrote the following review of this book shortly after it was published. Whether Hall’s review was published anywhere at the time I do not know, but he clearly intended it to be as he adhered quite strictly to an 800 word count – a common standard length required by many publications for such articles. GRH
Without hesitation these writings can be described as the finest constructive criticism of painting produced in our time. And of etching, engraving and lithography too, for that matter.
A FREE HOUSE! Should be read and reread, particularly by everyone who writes on art, and were I rich enough I would present a copy to all critics with the earnest request that they try to regard it as a textbook.
Sickert’s taste was catholic, and he was not afraid to admit the merits of such men as Poynter and Leighton, Solomon J. Solomon and Wyllie.
Although the book is made up of articles published as early as 1908, the last was written in 1929, and although naturally Sickert revised his opinion of certain artists as his taste broadened, there remains throughout a point of view firm and absolutely defined. His concern is with the painter, the maker of pictures with oil paint.
In these days when far too many of our painters are merely sketching, some well, some brilliantly, many badly; abetted, it must be owned by the modern preference for the superficial, Sickert’s insistence that sketches from nature are but the raw material from which the finished work must be planned and built up in the studio mark him as a painter belonging to the great tradition. Always he demands craftsmanship based on a real understanding of the properties and limitations of the medium. I will never forget his description of the portrait painter from life, as “the man who plasters Tuesday’s folds on top of Monday’s.”
He did admit that some did produce amazing improvisations direct from the model but he felt such men were in the second rank. Turner and Poussin, Delacroix and Degas, a host of others, felt the same.
Sickert lived on into an age when craftsmanship was largely ignored and was scarcely ever taught in the Art Schools; an age in which painting succumbed to speed, for it is not so difficult to pick up a few monkey tricks in the handling of oil colours. It is partly his adherence to tradition that makes him so great a painter, and he fits into the pattern that has gone on unbroken, changing and developing yet, in essence, the same, since Giotto.
The book is edited by Osbert Sitwell and his notes on the text are valuable as far as they go, but his work gives the impression of being half-finished. Many names mentioned by Sickert are not referred to, and it is insufficient to give translations of some French, German and Italian phrases and to leave others untranslated.
The illustrations, fine as they are, can hardly be said to give an adequate idea of Sickert’s achievement.
Mr Sitwell’s Short Character of the artist, which originally appeared in Orion*, serves as a preface.
* O. Sitwell, ‘A Short Character of Walter Richard Sickert’, Orion, 2, Autumn 1945, illustrated on p. 140. Orion Miscellany.
“Several writers have already described – or attempted to describe him: and a difficult task it must always prove!” Mt Sitwell tells us, and then points out his peculiar fitness for the task: “for I am a watcher of human beings and especially artists, as others are, for instance, birdwatchers, —-.” Well, he has missed this particular bird, badly.
He makes too much of Sickert the wit and of Sickert the man of the world, and he fails to see the real man, the idealist, the great painter and teacher.
Perhaps this is inevitable for only painters are “in the know”, and only they can really tell us about the character of painters, and then only of those with whom they are in sympathy. Mr Sitwell’s description of himself is more apt than he thinks: a trained observer he undoubtedly is, but he stays on the outside.
Sickert often talked to his students of Whistler and he described himself as a pupil of Whistler and not of Degas as Mr Sitwell would have it. With a few words, Sickert made his master live again and gave us more understanding of the man and his work than all the books which praise him for qualities he did not have, whilst they ignore those he possessed.
Painting, Sickert told us, could be divided roughly into two sorts. The good pictures represented “someone, doing something, somewhere”, the rest could be dismissed as “pictures of yearning”. These were the ones in which nothing whatsoever was happening.
He abhorred drawings which showed a single object, be it a figure or no, entirely unrelated to its surroundings, and he would make large black pencil crosses in the blank spaces, demanding: “what happens here?”
I believe his view of the purpose of painting and drawing will continue to influence artists, for the power he possessed as a teacher was considerable, and his principles will be handed on. The effect may not be widespread, his is not the easy way, but that does not matter. Quality alone counts.
Clifford Hall
©2021 The Estate of Clifford Hall