Walter Sickert

Ennui is one of Walter Sickert’s most famous, recognisable compositions. It is one of the few works he made that has entered the public imagination and has often been regarded as a chef d’oeuvre. Ennui transcends the usual constraints of his two-figure compositions by allegorising the emotional situation of the protagonists; the title signals a state of existence and not merely a scenario. This a key distinction that separates Ennui from the other genre scenes that Sickert painted during his Camden Town period. A man is seated at a table, a glass of water before him and the stump of a cigar raised to his lips. With his other hand he clutches the lapel of his jacket. Behind him a woman, her back turned to both the man and the viewer, is leaning on a dresser with her face to the wall. Her head is cropped from view. The life models were Sickert’s wayward childhood friend, known only as Hubby, and Marie Hayes, the artist’s charlady. The execution of this painting is lively and the palette is richly colourful: the man’s head is outlined in viridian green; the creases of his coat are defined in purple; his jawline is dappled with touches of dark pink. The characterisation of the figure is piquant and vivacious, and the man’s eyes gleam with an expression between boredom and vacancy.

Sickert made five paintings of the ‘Ennui’ composition. Along with two others versions domestic in scale, one owned by HM King Charles III (measuring 20 by 16 inches) and the other by Rockingham Castle (measuring 16 by 13 inches), this painting was perhaps made in a preparatory phase before Sickert executed the largest, most complete version of the subject. That painting, measuring 60 by 44 ¾ inches, was exhibited at the New English Art Club in the summer of 1914. Shortly afterwards it was acquired by the Contemporary Art Society and a decade later donated to the Tate Gallery. A fifth version, half the size of the Tate’s painting, was owned by Frank Hindley Smith who donated it to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1939. No version is dated, although this painting carries Sickert’s inscribed dedication to his painter friend Maurice Asselin, which he dated 1916. That date provides a terminus post quem for this painting, but probably did not refer to the date of execution. There is some disagreement about the relative chronology of these works. Based on ‘stylistic evidence’, the Sickert specialist Lillian Browse thought ‘the Tate version to have been the earliest, about 1913 or 1914’, thus implying that the three smaller versions were made afterwards. Also on stylistic grounds, Browse dated the Ashmolean version to 1917 or 1918, and those dates are generally accepted in the absence of any documentary evidence to support a more precise argument.

The subject-matter of Ennui was famously described by Virginia Woolf in an essay, Walter Sickert: A Conversation, which was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1934. In the prelude to the writing of that text, Sickert insisted to Woolf in a letter that he was much misunderstood: ‘I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters.’ Such encouragement led Woolf to declare that ‘[t]here are any number of stories and three-volume novels’ in Sickert’s pictures. Regarding Ennui, the room and its occupants are vividly but misleadingly characterised as a publican and his wife:

"[…] it is difficult to look at them and not to invent a plot, to hear what they are saying. You remember the picture of the old publican, with his glass on the table before him and a cigar gone cold at his lips, looking out of his shrewd little pig’s eyes at the intolerable wastes of desolation in front of him? A fat woman lounges, her arm on a cheap yellow chest of drawers, behind him. It is all over with them, one feels. The accumulated weariness of innumerable days has discharged its burden on them. They are buried under an avalanche of rubbish. In the street beneath, the trams are squeaking, children are shrieking. Even now somebody is tapping his glass impatiently on the bar counter. She will have to bestir herself; to pull her heavy, indolent body together and go and serve him. The grimness of that situation lies in the fact that there is no crisis; dull minutes are mounting, old matches are accumulating and dirty glasses and dead cigars; still on they must go, up they must get."

Sickert was often generous with his work, especially to younger artists. He presented this version of Ennui to his friend the young French painter Maurice Asselin (1882–1947). In the lower right-hand corner, the painting bears an inscription to Asselin dated 1916; this is likely the date when Sickert presented the picture, not the date of its completion. Both artists exhibited with the Carfax Galleries and, when Asselin showed paintings and drawings there in November 1915, Sickert registered his esteem in a review published the following month by The Burlington Magazine (shortly before Sickert gave Asselin this painting). In the review, Sickert described Asselin as ‘one of the most distinguished talents among the younger artists’. He praised his work for ‘not being doctrinaire’, and for the ‘intensity of dramatic truth’ in his genre pictures. (Of a painting called La robe grise, Sickert described how ‘Mr Asselin’s little girl is cutting her nails with the intensity and concentration of a monkey, and to that extent something essential has been torn out of life and put before us.’) The art historian Wendy Baron states that Sickert and Asselin were close during the first two years of the Great War, that Asselin occasionally shared Sickert’s studio at Red Lion Square, and that he even co-hosted ‘At Homes’ in 8 Fitzroy Street. It was during this period that Sickert made two portrait paintings of Asselin seated.

Considering the subject-matter of Ennui, its peculiar relevance to Asselin derived from the importance both he and Sickert attached to ‘the modern conversation-piece’, as Sickert called it. It is interesting to speculate about why Sickert gave this particular painting to Asselin—likely in homage to the young man’s artistic merits, but also, because Sickert was an incorrigible pedagogue, probably meant as an instructive example for Asselin’s future development.

The painting was sold by J. Leger & Son (known as Leger Galleries) in London. Leger held an exhibition of Asselin’s recent paintings in 1936, and he presumably sold Ennui to them directly. It was likely purchased there by the film actor Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973), who had it no later than 1943. It was exhibited in 1953 as part of his collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Robinson’s taste in art was for impressionist and modern work, principally made by French artists; Sickert was the only English artist represented in his collection, and he also owned Sickert’s late painting, Jack and Jill, which depicted Robinson as seen on a promotional poster for Bullets or Ballots (1936, director William Keighley). To meet the cost of his divorce from Gladys Lloyd in 1956, Robinson was forced to sell much of his art collection to the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos (1909–1996). The sale was arbitrated by Knoedler in New York. Following Robinson’s death in 1973, Niarchos liquidated many works he had purchased from Robinson including Ennui. The sale of ‘property from the collection of Edward G. Robinson’ was held at Sotheby’s, London, in 1973, where this painting was acquired—along with several others lots—by the dealer Arthur Tooth & Sons. It was sold again at Sotheby’s in 1978, where Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, acquired it. Sotheby’s then handled it for a third time in 1991, where it was bought by Mary (1925–2023) and Will Richeson, Jr. (1924–2001). He was an investment banker while she served as a trustee of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, and together they assembled an outstanding collection of British and American art. Between 1973 and 2017, they gave the museum in Santa Barbara no fewer than 43 works of art. Sickert was at their centre of their collecting; they gave four oils by him to Santa Barbara Museum between 1974 and 1986, and their collection included the important painting Brighton Pierrots, which they sold to the Tate Gallery in 1996. The late owners of Ennui, Herbert and Ann Lucas, acquired it through the Fine Art Society, London. They amassed a formidable, wide ranging and scholarly collection of Sickert’s work, of which Ennui was the pinnacle.