Patrick Bade
Walter Sickert: Was he Jack the Ripper?

Patrick Bade - Walter Sickert: Was he Jack the Ripper?

- So the picture, this very mysterious picture that you see on the screen is one of the most characteristic works by Walter Sickert. It dates from the late 1880s and it shows a London music hall, and it was this subject matter that inspired many of his best works. It’s a work that’s full of ambiguities: visual ambiguities, spatial ambiguities, moral ambiguities. You really have to take a moment to consider what you’re looking at and where you’re supposed to be in relation to this scene. You’re in this shadowy, dark space of the music hall. Music hall, very popular entertainment in London, had a rather loose reputation. So some of these music halls still exist in London, although they’re not the sort of smoky dens of iniquity they were in the 1880s and ‘90s. You could wander around during a performance and buy drinks at bars in the theatre, and they were also places, quite apart from going to see favourite musical stars like Marie Lloyd and so on, they were places for all sorts of rather louche and illicit sexual encounters: the prostitutes mingling with the crowd, men trying to pick up women, and so on. So what are we looking at? It’s very confusing. In fact, I think we’re looking, in the foreground, at the backs of chairs that are facing towards the stage. And what we can see in the main part of the picture is actually a reflection in a huge plate glass mirror, and we see on the stage Little Dot Hetherington, who was a popular star of the time. She looks very young.

She looks like a little girl, and she seems to be dressed in her nightie. There was a big fashion around this time, we’ll see more images later, of music hall performers, both in London and Paris, who seemed to be very underaged, little girls, often in a state of, in their underwear or in their nightdresses, as I said, and often they would be singing in a little piping, little girl’s voice, but often singing songs with sexual undertones. You can see that she’s pointing up towards the balcony, and the song she’s singing, which was a very popular song at the time, is “The Boy I Love Is Up In The Balcony.” Now, in 2002, the American crime writer, Patricia Cornwell, published a book claiming that she had proof that Walter Sickert was actually Jack the Ripper, the notorious sex murderer, serial sex murderer, who between 1888 and 1891 murdered 11 prostitutes in the East End of London. So that’d be exactly contemporary, in fact, with a picture I’ve shown you. You can see, she’s confident she has the proof. You can see, “Jack the Ripper, Case Closed.” Of course, there’s been so many theories, who was Jack the Ripper, and lots of false leads, and, really, we just don’t know. And when this book came out, it caused quite a stir. It got a lot of publicity, but most critics dismissed her theories. He can’t possibly have committed all the murders, 'cause he wasn’t even in the country when some of them took place. But there is a theory, of course, that the murders were part of a conspiracy of Freemasons.

There’s also a theory that the heir to the throne, the grandson of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Connaught, was involved in the murders, or even that they may have been committed on his behalf to suppress scandals. But I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that Walter Sickert, he was a davka character. He liked to provoke, he liked to be mysterious, and he was always, he was certainly very, very interested in sex murders, and he was interested in the case of, he had a morbid fascination for the case of Jack the Ripper, and used to go around telling people, “Well, of course, you know, I know more about this than I’m going to tell you,” and I think that’s really probably as far as it goes. But of course he did paint a whole series of very sinister paintings that seem to suggest sexual violence towards women, like this. But he was such a sort of jokey character. I mean, this picture has two titles. One is “The Camden Town Murder” and the other is, “And What Shall We Do for the Rent?” So, I mean, you can see either, actually, I mean, is that woman dead? Has she been murdered here? Or is this a couple, a very poor couple, who are living in rented accommodation and he’s depressed 'cause he can’t pay the rent? So Walter Sickert was born in Munich and could easily have become a German artist, I suppose. His father was Danish and his mother was English. And in 1866, when he was still a small child, the war broke out between Denmark and Prussia, and his father decided to leave Germany, didn’t feel comfortable there anymore, and he came to Britain. He took British nationality. So Sickert grew up as a British subject. His father was a minor artist. I’ve never seen any of his work. I don’t know if he was any good or not. And initially, surprisingly, Sickert didn’t really seem to have much of a vocation for art. He wanted to be an actor, and for a short time, he did have a career. He was part of the company of the great Henry Irving and took various small roles, and here, this painting here, he’s showing himself as an actor.

He titled this picture, again, rather jokingly, “The Juvenile Lead.” And I think this is partly also connected with all the stuff about Jack the Ripper, that he was somebody who liked to play roles, and we’ll see this. I’m going to show you a whole series of self-portraits. Again, often mirrors. He’s very fascinated by mirrors. This one’s a little bit later. He did a number of very interesting self-portraits all the way through his life, I mean, almost like Rembrandt. You can follow his changing appearance as he gets older, until he gets very old. And this one, he gave the title, “Lazarus Breaking His Fast.” So this is apparently a painting when he recovered from an illness late in life. And this one, which you can see, he’s inscribed, “The Servant of Abraham.” I’m not quite sure. Is he showing himself as a rabbi here or as a Jewish character? Once again, he seems to be playing some kind of a role. That’s a marvellous piece of painting, I must say, an astonishing picture, right from the end of his life. So in 1881, he enrolled at the Slade School, which, from about this time onwards, up to the First World War, the Slade was really the most interesting art school in England. It produced a lot of the best artists of the period, Gwen John, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, and so on, Mark Gertler, they were all at Slade. But he was not happy with it and he took himself off to the great American painter, Anglo-American painter, James McNeill Whistler. And this picture, this is actually a painting by Whistler of around this time. So he worked closely with Whistler, and for a short time, his work is very, very similar to that of Whistler. This is Whistler.

This is Sickert, similar painting. All the way through his career, he always liked low-life subjects, low-life characters, and Whistler also was attracted to that kind of subject matter, poor people, ordinary people, finding the poetry in their lives and their surroundings. And you can see the obvious similarity in the composition here as well, the shopfront and using the verticals and horizontals to create quite an abstract composition. And this is Sickert on the left and Whistler on the right, paintings from the early 1880s, where you can see very strong debt, of course, in the very slightly murky, rather dingy colour range, and in the application of the paint, also very similar. This is Sickert. And so although he’s using a very, very limited range of colour, you can see that he, and we’ll see this again in later paintings, he often uses the colour red in quite a startling way and very, very effectively. There are a number of paintings, again, where he’s certainly using his experience of the theatre. This painting is entitled “The End of the Act.” You can assume that this is a depiction of some kind of Victorian melodrama and something dreadful is happening that’s deeply affecting this poor young woman, or the actress playing the poor young woman. So, but it was in the music hall that he, I think, really found his distinctive voice. This is Collins Music Hall in Islington, on Islington Green, sadly demolished, that no longer exists, but they’re all over London and they were tremendously popular at this time.

Now, in 1883, Sickert went to Paris, and I think most likely it was through Whistler that he made contact with Degas, and I would say that Degas was the single most important influence on Sickert’s development as an artist. This is a painting by Degas. It dates right back to the end of the 1860s, and it’s one of the very first pictures that Degas painted in the theatre. Well, he didn’t actually physically paint it in the theatre. It’s a depiction of the interior of a theatre. In fact, one of the very important things that Sickert got from Degas, Degas was very against painting directly from reality. He thought it was all fine to make little sketches, but really, you needed to compose a picture from memory in your studio. And actually, that brings me back to a question that somebody asked after… Oh, no, no, it wasn’t for you. Sorry, it was for somebody else. Somebody was asking me a question at the end of the lecture about Impressionism, why, or maybe it was for Lockdown, but what it was in Impressionism that was a dead end, cause I’d mentioned that I felt… Oh yes, it was for you. It was talking about the Pre-Raphaelites, of course. I said that I thought Impressionism in some way was a dead end. And of course Degas was totally against the principal idea of Impressionism, as I said, that you paint directly from life. He thought that was a dead end, and so did Whistler. Whistler said painting as the Impressionists do, just trying to record your sensory perceptions and put them down, Whistler said, that’s like trying to make music by sitting on the keyboard of the piano. Anyway, this is a picture by Degas that, like the one I showed you at the beginning by Sickert, gives you a tremendous feeling of actually what it’s like to be in the theatre in a way that no earlier artists had ever even attempted. So here you’re sitting in the audience and you’re extremely aware of the illusion on the stage and the reality of the interior of the theatre.

You’re very aware of the artificial lighting, the fact that, at this point, in the 1860s, of course, that’s gas lighting, so there would be little flames, like flames on your cooker, very, very dangerous, all the way along the front of the stage, and the figures on the stage are lit from below. And in the theatre, of course, you have this contrast between the artificial lighting and the dark, shadowy areas in theatre, and you’ve got the clash of illusion and reality. And so Degas is the great pioneer of this and it’s something that Sickert takes up, but he applies it to something that’s specifically English at the London music hall, so we see a lot of the same features, don’t we, between the Degas and Sickert, with his fascination with the artificial lighting of the theatre and the contradiction between illusion and reality. I mentioned that there was this fashion, of course, for these very young girls going on stage, dressed in their nighties, or in what would’ve been considered, really, at the time, a state of undress. And apart from Little Dot Hetherington, there were many others, there were two, May Milton, May Belfort. They were both English and they both went to Paris, and there was a big vogue for them in the early 1890s. And here are three images by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, May Belfort, who, in a little girl’s piping voice, she went on stage holding a cat, presumably a stuffed one rather than a real one. I don’t think many cats would cooperate with an act like this, and she used to sing a song,

♪ Daddy won’t buy me a bow-wow, a bow-wow ♪ ♪ I’ve got a little cat ♪ ♪ I’m very fond of that ♪

And of course, although she was singing in English, the French understood the double entendre of all of that and thought it was all absolutely hilarious. Back to Sickert, and here we are again in a dingy, smokey, grungy London musical hall. Again you see how effectively he uses the colour red. And this is, again we’ve got spatial ambiguities. As you can see, the audience are not facing towards the image we see, and again, you can see from the frame of that image, that in the background, what we’re looking at, is actually a reflection in a mirror and not directly at the scene on stage. And a comparison again between Sickert on the left-hand side, 'cause you’re down on the floor of the audience, you’re looking up to the stage, and the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec on the right-hand side, both cases, something you would never have been depicted earlier, the fact that because you’re sitting below them, they’re on the stage, that their feet are actually cut off by the edge of the stage. And so there are various artists fascinated by this illusions of the spectacle of the theatre. This is Degas again, marvellous pastel of a monotype, “Aux Ambassadeurs,” and on the left-hand side, a painting by the young Bonnard, also evidently influenced by Degas, and back to Sickert, with many of the same features. Notice, of course, in all these pictures that you would wear your hats, both men and women. You didn’t go to theatre without a hat. In fact, it’s really necessary.

I mean, I think the only person here who’s not wearing a hat, of course, and you can see him in profile on the right-hand side, is the conductor, and I think that’s also here. The man in the middle, he’s conducting the orchestra, but everybody else is wearing hats, and here too. And so I think he tends to like that the performer and the spotlight is on the performer, and either that blood red, such shocking red, or in pale or white costume. For more comparison, there are these wonderful Conte crayon drawings by George Seurat, dating from around the same time, in the middle of the 1880s, also an artist who’s clearly been influenced by Degas. So Sickert is not only interested in what’s going on on the stage. He’s interested in what’s going on in theatre, and particularly, he likes to look up to the gods in the balcony, where the working-class people are, and there are a number of images like this. And for comparison, this great Swiss-French artist, Felix Vallotton, also looking up into the gods, with an enthusiastic crowd cheering a patriotic song. This is a woodcut and that dates from around the early 1890s. And here we are right, we are actually up in the gods. God, and you can just imagine how fusty and smoky and smelly and uncomfortable that must have been. We’re actually behind those people, looking down on the stage. So the great bulk of his music hall images date from the 1880s and '90s, and it’s a subject that he then gives up more or less after 1900, but there is this extraordinary painting, actually painted during the First World War, of performers on the pier at Brighton.

You see the bow fronted Brighton houses in the background, with many of the same features, the interest in the artificial light and the artifice of the spectacle, and once again, I think, in all these pictures, a slightly sinister undertone to the atmosphere. Throughout his life, Sickert painted a great many portraits. This one dates from 1894 and it’s got a tremendous verve and bravura. But tell me, honestly, would you really want to commission Sickert to paint your portrait? I think you can see why he was rarely actually… He painted portraits, 'cause he wanted to paint them and he enjoyed doing it, but he wasn’t the kind of artist who could make a living from commissioned portraits. And I think this makes quite an interesting comparison, 'cause this is a contemporary, Giovanni Bellini, not Bellini, Boldini, Giovanni Boldini, on the right-hand side. You can see why he was very, very popular and could command huge, huge prices. I mean, there are certain interesting comparisons between the two, particularly, I would say, in the bravura of the brushwork, bravura, this freedom and confidence and brilliance of the brushwork, but obviously, Boldini is a lot more kind and flattering to his subject. Sickert was rather scathing about these flattering Belle Epoque portraits of Boldini. He said Boldini’s portraits are all “wiggle and chiffon.” But he could be a wonderfully telling portraitist. I don’t why I’ve got that Share Screen at the top there and I don’t know how to get rid of it. Never mind.

This, I find, this is a small picture and it’s in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which is just reopening, I think, this week, and I find it very touching. It’s presumably painted from memory, Sickert having glimpsed Aubrey Beardsley. Aubrey Beardsley had attended a service in commemoration of Keats at the little church in Hampstead, and he saw him. He was standing in the graveyard. You see Aubrey Beardsley, who died shortly afterwards, aged 27, from tuberculosis, looking terribly frail in this little painting by Sickert. And this is interesting. I’d love to know more about his contact with Israel Zangwill. I’m sure you’ve been following Trudi’s lectures. You will heard a lot about him. He was a fascinating character, humorist, novelist. He coined the phrase the melting pot, and he was a great chronicler, of course, of Jewish life and traditions. This painting dates from the 1890s, and it’ll be interesting to know quite how Sickert and Zangwill came across one another. This is a much later portrait, and it’s of a French restaurateur. This actually dates from after the First World War, and it’s rather, and his exuberant character comes across very well, and of course this is a picture with much more luminous and lively palette of colour. There are certain places that Sickert was very attracted to and he went back to again and again, and one of them was Dieppe on the coast of Normandy. Dieppe was full of English people, 'cause it was before the tunnel. One of the main routes from England to France was Newhaven-Dieppe, and it was probably a rather interesting place to be in the 1880s and '90s. It was full of louche and disgraced English people.

You know, if you were… The Victorians didn’t really like scandals. They preferred to suppress them. And so if a school master or a vicar was caught with a choirboy, he would be quietly tipped off to go to France, “That’s where you belong.” Of course they tried that with Oscar Wilde, who was tipped off and told to hop it to France, but he stubbornly refused to go, with very tragic consequences. And it was also full of women with dubious reputations, divorced women. So as I said, it was full of English people with rather dubious reputations, and Sickert obviously enjoyed this louche atmosphere, and he was actually in Dieppe when several of the Jack the Ripper murders took place, which gives him a clear-cut alibi. This is the Gothic church in Dieppe. You can see it’s late Gothic, Flamboyant style. And so rather like Monet, and I’m sure he was very aware of Monet’s work, he often liked to paint the same building in different light or weather conditions. Here again is the church in Dieppe, and for comparison, of course, the famous Rouen cathedrals that date from 1894, so just a couple of years earlier, and they had had a tremendous success. I’m quite sure that Sickert was very well aware of them. So I think he likes these rather strange light effects at the end of the day, the lighting the French call “Entre Chien et Loup,” between the dog and the wolf, when the daylight is fading and the artificial light is beginning to come on. Another view of Dieppe, and yet another, all with this fading daylight. And this is one of his later views of Dieppe, of the beach at Dieppe, showing beachwear of around 1900. Another city that he was very fascinated by, and painted on many occasions, was Venice. Of course, Venice was a great capital of the Belle Epoque.

Wagner died there, as I’m sure you know. Everybody who was anybody, Faure, Sargent, Henry James, they all liked going to Venice at the . Here is Sickert’s view of St. Mark’s. By comparison, Monet. Monet was there in 1908 and painted a whole series. But it’s a very different Venice that you find in the paintings of Sickert and the paintings of Monet, Monet’s, of course, sun-drenched and full of colour, whereas Sickert, his view of Venice reminds me of the horror film “Don’t Look Now.” It’s a seedy, sinister, decadent Venice that you also, of course, get towards the end of the Thomas Mann novella, “Death in Venice.” This is still from the '90s. Oh, it was one of the scariest movies I think I’ve ever seen. I jumped out of my skin several times in the cinema when watching that movie. So it’s a dark and dingy Venice that we get in the paintings of, that’s not actually so similar from the East End of London. So here are two paintings by Sickert, Venice on the left-hand side, and he makes Venice look every bit as grungy as the Docklands of London that we see on the right-hand side. And once again, of course, St. Mark’s in Venice by Sickert, and you can see a very different… I don’t think these were painted in the way that Monet would’ve painted. I don’t think he set up his easel and painted it from life, so to speak. I think these are paintings from memory, but nevertheless, recording different light and colour effects on the front of the cathedral. Now we get back to his paintings of the nude, and I suppose they’re erotic. I think this is an erotic painting, meant to be seen as such. But again, there is this element of the sinister. You know, she could easily be, she could be a victim of a sex murderer. This could be a corpse that we’re looking at.

And again, I think, an important influence on him was of course Degas, who de-glamorizes the female nude. This was considered to be a very shocking thing at the time, with his so-called keyhole nudes, where it’s as though the artist, the woman is going about her ablutions, unaware that she’s being watched by a man. So the artist is looking at her through the keyhole of the bathroom and wanting to get away from cliches of feminine beauty and the pin-up. And another artist who, I think, makes an interesting comparison with Sickert is Bonnard, in a series of paintings that he made in the 1890s, which are quite special in his career. Bonnard, who came from a very bourgeois background, was rather uptight, and, I think, rather belatedly discovered sex. He picked up a shop girl and they clearly had a very torrid and rather exciting love life in the 1890s. Eventually, of course, they would marry, after many, many years of a rather furtive, hidden relationship. So this is, in fact, his future wife. This is Marthe Bonnard. Once again, you’ve got the slightly smutty joke of the chatte, the cat, which has the connotations of the word pussy in modern American slang. This is also a picture, to me, that, yes, it’s erotic, but I get a sense of something sinister and rather brutal, particularly in this view from above, looking down on the apparently helpless figure of the nude woman. Another one of these Camden Town nudes. There are a whole lot of them. Of course, a very un-idealized view of the female view. You could say it’s more truthful. And is this Sickert himself? Is this his relationship with a woman, perhaps with a prostitute? And we have a strong sense, I think, in this picture, in the posing of the figures, of tension between the man and the woman.

This is another thing, I think, again, that he could have picked up from Degas. This painting, which is currently on show at the Orsay, a wonderful exhibition of Manet and Degas. If you can get to Paris and see that before the end of the summer, do. I’ve been five times already to this exhibition. I’m planning to go a sixth time on Thursday of this week. This is a picture, the title is just “Interieur,” “Interior,” but it’s quite similar to the Sickerts in that we sense that there is a narrative here, but we don’t really know what the narrative is, but something terrible, really, has happened between this man and this woman. And this on that I showed you earlier, which he gave the alternative titles of “The Camden Town Murder” and “What Shall We Do for the Rent?” And this could go with the Bonnard I’ve just shown you, isn’t it, this rather brutal, even pornographic, I suppose, view of the female body. There’s always a kind of jokey sense. I mean, for an artist who was actually, of course, only half English, he was half Danish, but in many ways he seems to me to be very, very English, and one of them is in his humour and his jokeyness with pictures like these, which he entitled, “Off to the Pub.”

Again, making the comparison with Degas on the right-hand side, a picture called “Bouderie,” “Sulking,” with the placing and the posing of the male and the female figures, that body language of the crossed arms… Incidentally, I’ll tell you who does that all the time, I think another time, when I do a lecture on Degas, I’m going to include images of Donald Trump. I googled Donald Trump, folded arms, came up with dozens of images of Donald Trump doing this when being confronted by journalists or being cross-examined. It’s a very eloquent, defensive body language. And the painting by Sickert on the left-hand side, he gave it a French title, “Ennui,” “Boredom,” and again, the placing of the male and the female figures and their posing suggests the tension between the sexes. Sickert had a very, very long career and he was very generous towards younger artists, and he encouraged several. He was obviously a very open-minded artist who was not one of those people who disapproved of everything new that came along. No, he was interested in everything new that came along. He was a kind of father figure to the so-called Camden Town Group, who were really English Fauves, just before the First World War. But probably one of the most controversial aspects of his career is the work that he did in the 1920s and '30s based on photographs. This is clearly based on a photograph. It’s based on a photograph of the great conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham. I wonder if they ever met. They were a pair of real davka characters.

But many people, for many years, saw this use of photographs, this transcription of photographs, often taken from newspapers, press photographs, as a sign of the utter decline of his talent. But in the 1960s and '70s, with the advent of Pop Art, he came to be seen as a precursor of the way that Pop Artists made use of popular photographic imagery. I mean, this is clearly, and you can see it’s squared up. Can you see the squares in the background? He’s quite simply just taken a casual snapshot photograph and squared it up and turned it into a painting. And very often he would, just as, you know, Pop Artists would do, Paolozzi, for instance, did a lot of this kind of thing, he saw an image in a newspaper of a female pilot, it’s Amy Johnson, I think it is, being welcomed at an airport after her heroic flight. And you can see he’s just cut out the image in the newspaper and turned it into a painting, and again. So I’d be interested to know what you think. Do you think this is a total failure of creativity or is this a highly original development in his late work? This became quite famous, his image of King Edward VIII, just before his abdication. Again, it’s based on a newspaper photograph, a very different, casual, offhand image of the king, and for comparison, I’ve got a rather pompous official painting of King Edward VII on the left-hand side, from the beginning of the century. And he loved the movies and he liked popular culture. And so you could see this painting, which he called “Jack and Jill,” not quite sure why, is directly transcribed from a publicity photograph for a thriller with Edward G. Robinson. And here he is, right at the end of his life, as a sort of grand old man and living in Islington. And I think, yes, that’s all I’ve got to show you, so I’m going to end a bit early today and I’ll see what we’ve got in the way of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

You all want to come to Paris, too? I’m always happy to see people when they come to Paris.

Julian, I think, the trouble is, I can’t, unless I stop to write this down. Julian, why don’t you send your question to either Lauren or Judi, and I promise I will get back to you directly.

Duke of Clarence. Thank you. Yes, one of those misspeaking things, Duke of Clarence, not Duke of Connaught. Was Sickert Jewish? Not that I know of. I don’t think so. Thank you.

“The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery,” available for free on YouTube. I will watch it later. Thank you very much. “Men in the balcony aren’t wearing hats.” That’s probably because right up in the balcony, they’d be working-class people. Incidentally, at the moment, there’s another wonderful show in Paris you should all come and see if you can, about Sarah Bernhardt.

And, of course, Mucha, Alphonse Mucha, the Czech Art Nouveau artist, he got his great break when Sarah Bernhardt commissioned him to make a poster for her, more or less overnight, over Christmas, when they couldn’t find another artist, and they gave him a free ticket. But the problem for him was that he was very poor and he didn’t own a hat, so he had to actually borrow a hat, and even that was actually in the balcony where he was sitting. Japonisme is part of every, is in the bloodstream.

The point, though, I would say, Ron, with Japonisme, by this point, if we’re talking 1890, Japonisme is in the bloodstream of Western avant-garde. A lot of the features that we recognise as being Japonisme don’t necessarily have to have come directly from Japanese woodcut prints. They can, as you point out, they can come indirectly through the earlier generation of artists who’d looked at Japanese prints, including Whistler, Degas, and all the people you mentioned.

Q: Did he sketch the scene live first?

A: My guess is he probably did make lots of little brief, what the French called , a little sketch, as an aide-memoire.

Do I, Edward Hopper… Interesting idea. Of course, I can see a definite parallel, actually, with Edward Hopper, you know, in the poetry, you know, something like the “Nighthawks,” that very, very famous painting by Edward Hopper, seeing often a slightly sinister poetry in the banal and the ordinary. Whether Hopper actually was directly influenced by him or not, I wouldn’t like to say. Sickert’s portrait of Churchill. Probably the place to find out that would be the National Portrait Gallery, if they don’t have it themselves.

No, I don’t think he was the killer. I really don’t. I think it’s highly, highly unlikely. I think it was all a big joke as far as he was concerned.

Yes, interesting, Ron. I mean, well, probably, artists can come up with an innovation separately and I wouldn’t have thought that Sickert was sufficiently known and fashionable in the 1950s and early '60s for Andy Warhol to actually steal the idea from him. So I think it’s probably some idea that they came up with independently and separately.

They’re not, yes, I agree. I wouldn’t say that Sickert’s paintings are just a straight copy, but, and we’ll, yeah, I think the jury’s out a little bit on those late paintings, whether they are innovatory or actually a failure of inspiration.

That’s too big a question, Michael, about my views on modern art. I’m sure there’s plenty that I also find unintelligible, although sometimes I find it really interesting. I mean, a place I find absolutely infuriating is the Bourse, the old Bourse de Commerce, which has now got the collection of Monsieur Pinault, and most of that just looks like modish, pretentious rubbish to me, so I’m sounding like a horrible old git, but there is quite a lot of very fashionable contemporary art, which certainly doesn’t mean a thing to me, but maybe that’s my problem and my limitation.

Thank you very, very much indeed, and we’re on to Sargent on Wednesday.