He was quite a card was our Walter. It was Osbert Sitwell who recalled that the younger Sickert mixed with "prize fighters, jockeys, painters, music-hall comedians . . . washerwomen and fishwives." As did his friend Jack B. Yeats, of course. "The jokes, the quips, the seriousness, the fun, the acting, the singing, the snatches of old music-hall songs and even of hymn-tunes" peppered his conversation and prose.
Asking him to tea in 1934, Virginia Woolf wryly observed a 73-year-old Walter with `no illusions as to his greatness." Sickert said then of his art criticism: "They'll collect it all one of these days." For by 1934 he had been publishing writings on art - and anything else that struck his boundless fancy - for over 50 years.
Walter Richard Sickert was the most cosmopolitan painter of his generation in England. He was born in Munich in 1860 where his father, a Danish artist who had trained in France, and his Anglo-Irish mother then lived. The Sickerts moved to London in 1868, family friends included Oscar Wilde and William Morris, and summer holidays were spent in that artists' haven, Dieppe.
Sickert left school in 1878 to go on the stage, an experience, says his biographer Wendy Baron, which "influenced him personally and professionally for the rest of his life." Abandoning the boards in 1881, he became studio assistant to James McNeill Whistler after a brief stint at the Slade School of Art. Baron again: "his keen grasp of the politics of the art world and his life-long flair for polemics and publicity were also cultivated in Whistler's service."
Then as studio errand-boy, Sickert was sent to Paris in 1883, with a letter of introduction to Edgar Degas, whose Paris studio became for Sickert "the lighthouse of my existence."
Taking his example from Degas's paintings of the audience and performers of Parisian cafe-concerts, Sickert chose the London music-halls as the subject of his first, major pictures. He chose to follow Degas's admonition that a painter should work in the studio from drawn studies, observation and memory, away from the "tyranny of nature." And this way of working was fundamental to his whole career.
Sickert was accused of vulgarity when those first music-hall paintings were shown. He defended himself robustly: "the fact that a painter sees in any scene the elements of pictorial beauty is the obvious and sufficient explanation of his motive for painting it."
So he neatly encapsulated Degas and Whistler: like Degas advocating the merit of everyday, urban subject-matter; like Whistler propounding the gospel of art for art's sake.
Later Sickert, with those fellow-painters dubbed the Camden Town Group, felt morally compelled to seek out subjects that were regarded as insignificant or, at worse, vulgar: "The more art is serious, the more it will tend to avoid the drawingroom and stick to the kitchen. The plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts . . . and while they will flourish in the scullery, or on the dunghill, they fade at a breath from the drawingroom. Stay! I had forgot. We have a use for the drawing-room - to caricature it."
There's a whole lot of Sickert in that "Stay!" And to present his subject matter, he chose a palette which was most often low-toned and muddy, with much use of reddish-browns and yellow-greens.
Anna Gruetzner Robins has produced a real labour of love: with over 400 entries offering a great deal of new insight into Sickert as artist, polemicist and man-about-town. Brilliantly annotated, it's also great fun. For instance: "When I was living in Dieppe (1885) a friend said he would very much like me to see the paintings of a young man in an insurance office who wished to desert this business and take up art.
"I accompanied him to a tiny room where a young man was painting. I glanced at his work, then came away. My friend said: `What do you think of it?' I replied: `I think he had better stick to insurance.' It was Gauguin."
He is wonderful on his friendship with Degas. From 1935: "It may interest readers to hear a criticism made by probably the greatest critic of the last century on Monet's large series of water-lilies. I went with Degas to Durand Ruel's first exhibition of the famous Nympheas (1900). There were about six large ottomans, on which reposed some ladies in a state of hushed ecstasy. We entered, somewhat intimidated, on tiptoe, and left discreetly and silently. Degas said to me: `Je n'eprouve pas le besoin de perdre connaissance devant un etang.' (`I don't feel the need to lose consciousness in front of a pool.')"
The old blunderbuss was full of himself to the end. To one editor he wrote: "I know as much about modern painting (by which I mean 19th and 20th century) as anyone in England and I can give critical ideas in `comprehensible' language."
Ms Robins concludes fondly, justly and aptly: "Sickert had a burning desire to write about art that was prompted by more than a need for financial gain. He was one of those rare artists whose love for words matched his love of image-making. His writings deserve to be better known."
Yet it does remain something of a mystery, even to those of us who are among his more fervent fans, that this remarkable fellow who wrote in firework displays of vermilion, aquamarine, cadmium yellow and purple patches, and whose prints are masterly, should have stuck so steadfastly to that palette which was most often low-toned and muddy, with much use of reddish-browns and yellow-greens.
Andy Barclay is Design Editor of The Irish Times