Walter Sickert, Noctes Ambroisianae

Walter Richard Sickert, Noctes Ambroisianae 1906, oil on canvas, Nottingham City Museums: Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham

Sickert is well-known for the music hall paintings that he made from the late eighteen nineties and into the first decade of the twentieth century, and his fascination for these scenes must have stemmed from his early ambition to pursue an acting career. Like many aspiring thespians, Sickert had been seduced by the atmosphere of the theatre as a young man, and then later as an artist, by the bright light and deep shadow effects that was the stock in trade for show business.  

Music halls were ubiquitous in the period, with more than 300 of them in London alone; it was mass entertainment available cheaply and regularly. In Mathew Sturgis’ meticulously researched biography of the artist, Walter Sickert: A Life, he also points out that shows lasted a long time, from eight pm to midnight and that drink was feely available during the whole time. So, inevitably the climate was not one of mute, rapt and respectful attention. It was always much more boisterous, with plenty of ‘participation’ that could drift into alcohol-fuelled heckling, particularly from the cheap seats in the gallery shown here.

Like Degas’s paintings of contemporary life, his ballet dancers, milliners, jockeys and circus performers, Sickert chose to depict modern life as lived, with bodies articulated this way and that. The modernity of this lay not just in the quasi-impressionist brushstroke style both artists adopted (Sickert knew and admired Degas’s work) but in their renunciation, following Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists before them, of classical or religious subject matter which had long been the conventional domain for fine art. It is easy to forget quite how daring it was at the time, to choose subjects for painting that were so ‘real’.

Although the title of the painting is seemingly a reference to written pieces which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine some seventy years earlier, it must also be ironic in that the night’s entertainment was hardly ambrosial; it was not like the food of the gods, but sustenance of an altogether baser nature. On the other hand, such nights did provide escapism from urban London life whose conditions could be brutal for the working poor. The faces illuminated here have been touched by something, if not divine, then sensational (in its literal sense) but responses to the performance were surely less than reverential. However, there also remains something unsettling about this and similarly themed works by Sickert. Was the ambrosia of entertainment given to feed the gods (the baying crowd occupying the ‘gods’, the cheap seats) intended to placate or appease them or to stimulate them? Was it nourishing or toxic?

Noctes Ambrosianae feels as if Sickert is fearful of the idea of a crowd’s volatility. The audience here (or at least this section of it) is shown to have a kind of collective dominion of its own, as if it were licensed to be disorderly. Each audience member is painted as barely distinguishable from another so that they have become an homgenous entity – the clothes, the skin tones, the expressions are rendered as if the audience were one amorphous body. Where figures are differentiated, they have an incubus-like lubriciousness to them. One of the leading Sickert scholars, Anna Gruetzner Robins, has pointed out that music hall performances of the period, particularly in songs performed by women, were frequently characterised by the inclusion of sexual innuendo and this created an artificial and perhaps troubling intimacy between the men in the audience, and the performer. Vesta Victoria

Walter Richard Sickert, Vesta Victoria at the Old Bedford (1890), oil on panel, private collection

for example (the subject of Sickert’s Vesta Victoria at the Old Bedford (1889) performed many knowingly suggestive songs – songs that projected a mock innocence - one of which, ‘Billy Green’, has the following chorus:

Ev'ry morning as the clock strikes nine

Billy comes knocking at the door

Then together off to school we go

And back again at half past four

Once we played the truant, just for fun

But it didn't really matter so to speak

For I learnt more from Billy on the day we stayed away

Than teacher could have taught me in a week

So this (male) audience crowd is pictured as willing, if not hypnotised  participants in a game where barely disguised lusts and yearnings are paraded and about which the artist seems at least equivocal, both tuned in to them but also disscociated from them. The performer on stage may or may not enjoy some command over the crowd, but it is the unpredictable excitability of its reaction that is rendered with brushstrokes that seem similarly ungovernable.

The crowd’s shabbiness is at odds with the stately, gilt-lit grandiosity of the architectural detail so that it (the crowd) seems not to belong there. Because of its lofty position and the empty space between it and the ornate ceiling, the audience’s unbefitting-ness, is emphasized. They are distanced and contained and at the same time their open-mouthed, undefined expressions are made to seem unhealthily diabolic. Is this Sickert expressing a fear and distaste while remaining mesmerised by them in equal measure? Is he in thrall to their base decadence and their alarming mercuriality? The viewpoint and the figures are chosen, I think, both to cleverly render theatrical illumination as a kind of abstract visual sensation – Sickert taking delight in the dramatic play of light - but also to convey his conflicting feelings of engagement and detachment towards an audience and the disturbing sensuous experience to be found in music hall.

The audience’s engagement, their vocal participation, is what gives Noctes Ambrosianae its strange charge. The figures occupy the cheapest seats, the ‘gods’, and yet there is a shape-shifting devilish aspect to them. Sickert’s phobic response is to distance the perspective and to paint faces as deliquescent smudges of flesh with eyes that seem like sightless perforations. These figures are restrained in serried ranks, as though the artist wants to control their troubling excitability. They appear like notes on a musical stave as if the artist wants them to be as predictably ‘played’ like an orchestral piece. Sickert is trying to impose his own authority on this crowd of what would otherwise be like so many random crotchets, subordinating them to his own harmonious sequence as if he fears its anarchic dissonance. Unlike model-sitters in some of his other works, these ‘sitters’ refuse to sit, and this want of control communicates instead a sense of powerlessness and anxiety.

Sickert’s audience here is penned in, like baying, predatory animals, the perspective on them more distant, so that we are unable to read whether they are enjoying the performance. Their individual proximity to one another also renders the lived experience of modernity for us. Sickert seems unable to diagnose his crowd; unlike the ‘The Camden Town Murder’ paintings, where narrative may be ambiguous but remains interpretable, his audience paintings by contrast seem to me to be more psychically liminal; the figures remain inaccessible to the artist, as if to him they are repellently uncanny.

If the audience is hyped up by the unseen performance on stage in Noctes Ambroisianae it is barely present in a later work by Sickert, Brighton Pierrots (1915).

Walter Richard Sickert, Brighton Pierrots, 1915, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London

The composition’s viewpoint this time is side-on to the open-air stage, as if the viewer might be the stage-manager of the production and sharing in what we can imagine to be the performer’s dejection at the sight of so many empty deckchairs. Although the palette is so much lighter and cleaner than in the earlier smoky theatre-gallery interiors, the mood remains other-worldly, coloured now by tragic disappointment. While some readings of the painting see it as a bleak commentary on human loss during the First World War, it is again the relationship between performer and audience that intrigues, and by extension, the artist’s rapport (or lack of) with it. The ‘act’ seems to prefigure Archie Rice, the disillusioned and declining music hall star from John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957). The ‘crowd’ remains powerful by its very absence, and this conjures a sense of unreality and existential futility as the performer goes through the motions. The ‘turn’ is lit by footlights and the consequent feeling of lambent artificiality is complemented by what Richard Shone describes in Sickert: Paintings as the ‘crepuscular peach and purple of the sky’. The fading light seems like a metaphor for Britain run-down and exhausted and changed utterly by war. Brighton here is a long way from its heyday, its empty candy-coloured deckchairs and awkward Pierrots seem tattered legacies of a bygone age. The yearned-for audience spirit, so unruly in the earlier music hall paintings yet now so absent, is perhaps denoted by the Chagallesque white bird escaping from the upper boundaries of the canvas.