Walter Sickert: A Life. Matthew Sturgis
opinion took a different view, while Richard’s friends were convinced that he had overstrained his constitution with his work on the Standard Yard. But such notions, if they reached Neuville, did little to console the distressed Nelly.73
Richard Sheepshanks had, at the time he first revealed his parentage, planned to alter his will in order to make provision for Eleanor. But he died before he did so. His sister Anne was his sole legatee. She had managed his affairs and shared his interests throughout his life, and she now readily took up the burden of his responsibilities. Eleanor became her charge. Miss Sheepshanks, unlike her brother, was not implacably opposed to Oswald Sickert’s suit – although she perhaps felt that it should be tested by the trials of time and distance. At any event, she arranged for Eleanor, after she had recovered from the shock of the moment, to go as a parlour-boarder to a ‘first-class’ school in Paris; and by 1857 she had found her a post as resident governess to the two daughters of George Harris, a Harrow schoolmaster, with a salary of £100 a year.74
Oswald Sickert, meanwhile, did not lose heart. He kept in touch with Eleanor and he persevered with his painting. There were modest successes. His scenes of contemporary agricultural life seem to have combined a fashionable ‘Realismus’ with a traditional German taste for landscape.75 He had a picture accepted by the Berlin Academy in 1856, and the following year he showed at the Kiel Kunsthalle, where the ‘fluent tone’ and ‘mood’ of his work was praised.76 Also in 1857 he exhibited a picture at the British Institute in London, and it is probable that he came over to see it, and Eleanor.77 He was dividing his time between Altona and Munich.78 He worked hard and his career advanced – but at a frustratingly slow pace. The market was crowded and sales were hard to get.
Eventually, he was obliged to compromise. In a bid to prove his ability to support a wife he returned to Munich and took a job on the Fliegende Blätter, a periodical noted for its comic illustrations. Many of Germany’s leading draughtsmen contributed to the weekly’s pages, but there was also much unsigned hackwork, and this is what Oswald Sickert was hired to provide.79 It is not likely that the work was very remunerative, but it does seem to have convinced Anne Sheepshanks of the suitor’s earnestness and capability. The marriage was allowed to go forward.
Oswald Sickert travelled from Munich to claim his bride. During the years of trial his ardour had remained undimmed. As Eleanor confided happily to one of her friends, he loved her ‘with all the strength of a reserved nature concentrated to love one object’.80 The wedding took place in the parish church at Harrow on 3 August 1859. Eleanor was resplendent in a gown of white striped silk. She had no fewer than five bridesmaids, including her two young pupils. Mr Harris gave her away,81 and Mrs Slee came over from Dieppe for the occasion.82 Although there is no record of Anne Sheepshanks’ attendance at the ceremony, she certainly gave her blessing to it. She also gave Eleanor an allowance with which to start out on married life.83
The honeymoon took the newly-weds through Belgium to Düsseldorf, on to the picturesque lake at Königswasser, and thence to Munich. There the young couple installed themselves in a small flat at 16 Schwantalestrasse. Eleanor brought with her little more than her beautiful wedding dress, her ‘Paris trousseau’, and a desire to make a happy home.84 They had little furniture beyond a bed and a piano; but that was probably all that they needed.85 It was certainly convenient; leases tended to be short in Munich and the Sickerts moved flat three times over the next four years.86
The Munich in which they established themselves was a thriving if rather pretentious little town, with a population of some 130,000. Although medieval in origin, it was very much a modern city, exuding a sense of newness, freshness, and cleanliness. Many of the recently built houses had little front gardens, and many of the streets were lined with trees. Munich was self-consciously proud to be the capital of Bavaria, and the home of its royal house. The Wittelsbach monarchs – the recently abdicated Ludwig I and the reigning Maximilian II – had conceived the city as a centre of culture and style. They had laid out broad avenues and spacious parks. They had erected a succession of mock-classical and mock-Renaissance buildings to complement the few pre-existing Gothic and baroque churches. The Wittelsbachs had also established important collections of art – the classical sculptures of the Glyptotech, the old masters of the Kunstmuseum, and the new masters of the Neukunst Museum. Munich was full of ‘new masters’, or would-be new masters. The numerous major building projects, the prospects of royal patronage, and the high quality (as much as the low price) of the Bavarian beer, made Munich a focus for painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, and artists of every sort and every nationality.
There were, according to one resident writing at the beginning of the 1860s, ‘about a thousand artists in Munich’. They constituted a distinct and lively social group. They were noted for their conviviality, their ‘love of amusement and pageant’.87 They ‘congregated and made merry with cheap Künstlerfesten’, some more formal than others.88 Every few years they would arrange an elaborate ‘costume ball’, taking over the main rooms of the Odeum and transforming them with fantastical decorations, before transforming themselves with no less fantastical costumes. Each spring the artists would decamp en masse to the wooded hills south of the city to celebrate a May-fest with dining, dancing, and revelling. Nor was it just artists who were drawn to Munich. The low cost of living in Bavaria encouraged a sizeable contingent of foreigners, and particularly of English people, to settle in the city. Food was inexpensive; there were no rates; and servants were easy to come by. In 1860 a fixed sterling income went further in Munich than in almost any other capital in Europe.
The cosmopolitan and artistic ambience of the city ensured that Eleanor felt none of the isolation that removal to a new and foreign world might have otherwise entailed. She found two supportive groups ready to welcome her: the artists and the English. Oswald Sickert’s long connection with Munich had given him a place near the heart of the city’s artistic community. Despite his commitments to the Fliegende Blätter, he continued to produce his own work as well, and to exhibit it at the Munich Kunstverein.89 He had many artist friends (Füssli and Willich had returned to the city from Paris); and Eleanor, with her knowledge of German, was able to welcome them, first at Schwanthalestrasse and then at a new flat in Augustenstrasse. There were English artists, too, in Munich, and many of these were drawn into the Sickerts’ convivial circle, along with other less artistic compatriots. Although there was an English ‘Minister Plenipotentiary’ at the Bavarian court,90 the main focus for the expatriate community was provided by the Anglican chaplaincy. There was at that time no actual church, but the congregation gathered for services each Sunday either at one of the new hotels or in a room at the Odeum.91
It was there that the Sickerts had their first-born child christened, barely a year after their arrival at Munich.92 Anne Sheepshanks, though she does not appear to have come over for the ceremony, agreed to stand as godmother to the young Walter Richard. And she must have been glad that the memory of her beloved brother was preserved in the boy’s middle name. For Eleanor, the choice may have served in part as an expiation of the lingering guilt and remorse that she felt over her (imagined) part in hastening Richard’s