Mastering Accounting

During the curtain call, Sickert hurled roses weighted with lead onto the stage and the fragrant missile almost hit Henry Irving, who was not amused. Whistler's infamous "ha ha!" could be heard in the crowd. As the audience was filing out, Whistler made a point of meeting the audacious young man. Other accounts suggest that Sickert "ran into" Whistler somewhere or followed him into a shop or met him at a party or through the Cobden daughters. Sickert was never accused of being shy or reticent about whatever it was he wanted at the moment. Whistler supposedly persuaded Sickert to stop wasting his time with art school and come to work in a real studio with him. The young man left the Slade School and became Whistler's apprentice. He worked side by side with the Master, but what his days with Ellen were like is a blank. Available references to the early years of Ellen and Walter's marriage do not indicate an attraction to each other or the slightest fragrant scent of romance. In Jacques-Emile Blanche's memoirs, he refers to Ellen as so much older than Sickert that she "might have been taken for his elder sister." He thought the couple were well matched "intellectually" and observed that they allowed each other "perfect freedom." During visits to Blanche in Dieppe, Sickert paid little attention to Ellen, but would disappear in the narrow streets and courtyards, and into his rented "mysterious rooms in harbour quarters, sheds from which all were excluded." The divorce decree cites that Sickert was guilty of "adultery coupled with desertion for the space of 2 years 6c upwards without reasonable excuse." Yet it was really Ellen who eventually refused to live with Sickert ...»