Walter Sickert: A Conversation

"What interests me about the Sickert essay is the ongoing conversation Woolf is having about the painters in her life, and her thinking about how a life-story can be told through words as opposed to through shapes and colours. The essay is based on her having seen a particular exhibition of Sickert paintings in London in the early ’30s, and then having a conversation about them with her painter friends, including her sister Vanessa, her brother-in-law Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant. She is always somewhat rivalrous with the painters, and deeply interested in painting. She has a painter in To the Lighthouse , who is constantly wondering, ‘how can I hold the balance between these parts of my painting?’, just as Woolf is always saying, ‘how can I hold the balance between these parts of my novel?’ In her essay, she makes up a biographical story behind one of Sickert’s paintings, but she tells us there is a ‘silent land’ which painters go into where they are talking about blocks of colour and textures and shapes, where the writers can’t follow. She is wistful about that silent land. She’d quite like to go there, but she has to use words. What she does with the Sickert painting, which is called Ennui —an untranslatable word meaning fed-upness or inertia or boredom or lassitude—is to make up a story about a man and his wife, and what a terrible marriage they have got, and how he is a publican living over a dreary pub. The story is completely invented from what she sees in the painting. And there are the painters saying: ‘look at the curve of that arm’, and ‘look at that block of red’, ‘look at the reflection in the mirror’, and she’s saying: ‘and think about how they have got to go down and open the pub and serve the customers’. It’s a wonderful enactment of the disparity between thinking about a subject as a writer, and thinking about a subject as a painter."