This book is dedicated to Mark Eastment my mentor throughout my writing ( in spite of our disagreement as to where the eastern boundary of Fitzrovia actually lay).
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce this material. Please contact the publisher with any enquiries relating to images or the rights holders.
My thanks to my exceptional picture researcher Stella Harpley and to Eduardo Sant’Anna for his patient work with preparing the illustrations; and to Brian and James Webb for their enthusiastic support and imaginative design.
Front cover The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915, William Roberts, 1961–62.
Back cover Percy Street, Roland Collins, 1966.
Inside covers and endpapers Advertisments for George Rowney & Co., whose offices were based in Percy Street and Windsor & Newton, whose offices were based in Rathbone Place.
INTRODUCTION
SICKERT ‘AT HOME’ IN FITZROY STREET
BLOOMSBURY IN FITZROVIA
VORTICISM AT LA TOUR EIFFEL
ARTIST ACTIVISTS IN CHARLOTTE STREET
AUGUSTUS AND NINA AT THE TAVERN
INTRODUCTION FITZROVIA
IS
Above Tom Driberg with the landlady of the Fitzroy Tavern.
Opposite Entrance to James McNeil
Whistler’s studio, 8 Fitzroy Street, Walter Sickert.
A NOTIONAL TERRITORY, not to be found in any official document or geographical survey. It is not unusual for cities to name streets after celebrated people so it has been assumed that the Fitzroys – street, square, court etc. – to be found near each other, south of Regent’s Park, could be traced back to Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of Charles II, who was ennobled Duke of Grafton. Henry’s son, Charles, married Anne Warren, thus Warren Street, and so on.
But actually the name ‘Fitzrovia’ has a more lowly and later origin. On the 27th March 1940, the Daily Express, under the headline ‘No moaning at this bar’, its columnist William Hickey writing of the patriotism in wartime of the Fitzroy Tavern, standing at the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street, named the surrounding area ‘Fitzrovia’. William Hickey was the pseudonym of a young reporter, one Tom Driberg, who became a frequent toper in the said tavern. He felt, as did Augustus John, an earlier Tavern toper, that the pub was ‘the Clapham Junction of the world’, let alone the centre of a small part of the London conurbation.
Although Driberg gave the area its name, he failed to be specific about its extent, which seems to have been left to the whims and convenience of each commentator. Hugh David in The Fitzrovians has his book’s end papers carry maps extending the territory east across
Bloomsbury and Holborn, and south down to Shaftesbury Avenue, to include Soho. Dr. Anne Basler, on the other hand, states clearly in the title of her book – The Other Side of Oxford Street, albeit she admitted its other boundaries were ‘fluid’ and ‘difficult to anchor’. Whilst Sally Fiber, grand-daughter and daughter of the Tavern’s landlords, states with the absolute assurance of a resident –
Thus Fitzrovia spans from Euston Road in the north, Oxford Street in the south, Great Portland Street in the west and Grafton Place in the east…
Her eastern boundary is curious, as most writers have it as Tottenham Court Road, a Domesday Book divider of this patch; and there it will lie for the whims and convenience of the writer of this book.
When the Fitzroy/Graftons began to develop the area, some grand plans were envisaged, and, indeed, in the early 18th century, the Adam brothers were commissioned to design for Fitzroy Square. But decades passed and the gentry began to move into Mayfair and Belgravia, resulting with property developers taking over with altogether less distinguished, more tawdry, housing. By the beginning of the 20th century much of Fitzrovia consisted of buildings let by the floor, oftimes by the room. Many of the occupants were smalltime artisans, particularly furniture makers; and the area had become increasingly multicultural, with political refugees arriving, many
Above and opposite Constable’s studio with blue plaque, No. 16 Charlotte Street.
from France and Germany, a number of these opening cheap food shops and cafés/restaurants. The area became a colourful Bohemia in comparison to the more sleazy Soho, south of Oxford Street.
Fitzrovia was not unknown territory to artists before the 20th century, after all John Constable had spent his last years at No.76 Charlotte Street, and, indeed, is said to have died in its attic in 1837; the building carrying the blue plaque to that effect no longer exists. The painter of vast Victorian scenes, such as ‘Derby Day’, William Frith, had a studio in Fitzroy Street that was later to be used by Walter Sickert (he actually referred to it as ‘The Frith’); it was at No.8 Fitzroy Street in the studio later to be used by Duncan Grant that James McNeil Whistler employed the young Sickert as his assistant; and the landscape artist, Peter de Wint lived for a time at No.10 Percy Street.
Lesser known is the existence, from the early 19th century, of an art school at No.6 Charlotte Street, run by someone described as an exceptional teacher, Henry Sass. Initially it was named the Drawing Academy, but later The School of Design. This was not only to be attended by the young William Frith, fresh down from Yorkshire, but by John Everett Millais and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose family were actually living in Charlotte Street at the time.
That Fitzrovia should attract art students and young artists, trying to establish some sort of reputation for themselves, is not surprising, given the availability of cheap lodgings and charitable, sympathetic café and restaurant owners. But a more key association lies with the
SICKERT ‘AT HOME’ IN FITZROY STREET
FEW
ARTISTS COULD HAVE OCCUPIED AS MANY STUDIOS as Walter Sickert. Wherever he found himself he needed to paint, and for that a studio would be taken, irrespective of how many other studios he was occupying at the time. Short stays or long periods, whether in England or abroad, involved studios being taken in numerous places, from Paris, Venice and Dieppe to Brighton, Margate and Bath. In London alone, whether related to his teaching, painting or socializing, Sickert had, at various times, studios in Camden, Chelsea, Westminster, Islington, Kensington and Holborn, not infrequently two at the same time. And when it comes down to Fitzrovia, he lived, painted, taught or socialized in one in Charlotte Street, and in another near Warren Street; but his favourite territory was to be Fitzroy Street. He is said to have advised young would-be artists –
Take a Large studio! – if you can’t afford to take one, take two.
Sickert’s enthusiasm for studios seems to have been a source of some amusement to friends.
Opposite The stylish young Walter Sickert, photographed by George Charles Beresford, 1911.
Walter Richard Sickert was born in Munich in 1860, his family moving to England in 1869. Although he came from an artistic family, his father, Oswald, an artist, Sickert’s early ambition was to become an
actor. For a short, not particularly successful, time he found work in repertory theatres, but art was soon to supersede acting. Yet Sickert’s need to perform, to have an audience, was to remain a characteristic that stayed with him. Whether he was being serious about art, or entertainingly amusing about much else, the ability to perform became a useful asset, whether he was teaching, cajoling potential art buyers, or hosting social gatherings.
In 1881 he enrolled at the Slade but, on finding the atmosphere frustrating, was lucky enough to be taken on by James McNeil Whistler, as an assistant, in his studio in No.8 Fitzroy Street; this seems to be the start of Sickert’s attachment to the area. Eventually he realized that his own aesthetic leanings were beginning to differ from those of Whistler, and, from the mid-1880s, he was to spend much of his time abroad, largely in Dieppe, a place where his family had frequently holidayed. With an introduction to Degas from Whistler, and an acquaintance with Jacques Emile Blanche, whose family had a summerhouse in Dieppe, Sickert began slowly to build a reputation for himself in France, even being given a one-man showing at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris.
It was in 1905 that Sickert decided to return to London, to try to build up his career in England. He considered that it might be more effective in doing this to combine forces with other artists rather than to go it alone. Sturgis, in his book, suggests that Sickert possibly had the idea of creating a Salon d’Autumne milieu in London – ‘to provide little pictures for little patrons’. Sickert put it –
Maple Street, London, Walter Sickert, c.1915. One of many ‘little pictures for little patrons’.
I want to keep up an incessant proselytising agency to accustom people to mine and other painters work of a modern character.
At first he looked to fellow ex-Slade students, now friends such as William Rothenstein and his brother Albert Rutherston, Harold Gilman, and Spencer Gore; and to Walter Russell, then teaching at the Slade.
To these he added Lucien Pissarro, who he knew from the New English Art Club – and so the group grew.
Albert Rutherston wrote of Sickert’s charisma –
Sickert seemed to become at once our natural leader… he seemed the most perfect cosmopolitan figure who had worked alongside Degas, who knew France intimately…
To develop his scheme Sickert took rooms at No.19 Fitzroy Street and began furnishing them; but so eager was he to get going that he ran his first ‘at home’, as they came to be called, in his own studio, that he had taken at No.8. Sturgis writes of this ‘rehearsal’ ‘at home’ as being a hasty collection of cigarettes, dishcloths, picture frames and a piano (Gore’s sister proved to be an inspired singer), for the ‘at homes’ were to be socials, not merely laid on for pushing sales. It
THE VORTICISM AT LA TOUR EIFFEL
…to catch sight of the elegant figure of Sickert and his entourage; of the Sybil Nina Hamnett being helped home, a waiter at each elbow; of Herbert Asquith in poetic travail; of minor royalty slumming for the evening; of actresses and Irishmen, musicians magicians, cosmeticians; of a pageant of Sitwells, some outriders from Bloomsbury, a yapping kennel of politicians; to be part of this glorious constellation even for a single evening was to become a man or woman of the world.
RESTAURANT OF THE EIFFEL TOWER HOTEL, No.1 Percy Street, was one of the most noted Fitzrovian hostelries as a rendezvous for artists, in spite of it being selective and expensive. Originally built as a private house in 1776, by 1896 it had become a restaurant, to be acquired, in 1910, by a Viennese chef, Rudolf Stulik.
Opposite The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915, William Roberts, 1961–62.
Stulik could be described as a ‘character’, claiming to have acquired his cooking skills from being a kitchen boy for the Emperor Franz Joseph, to working for select restaurants across Europe, and with a spell as Lord Kitchener’s chef in Egypt; the tale was his to tell!
In Percy Street his restaurant–cum-hotel consisted of quite a small room on the ground floor, with some dozen tables; a private dining
room above (sometimes used for secret liaisons); and above that there were bedrooms, dark and cluttered with heavy Austrian furniture. The restaurant itself was quite proper – white tablecloths, cloth napkins, delicate wine glasses; the food sophisticated – Stulik’s specialities being canard presse, sole Dieppoise, and gateau St. Honore. Stulik considered himself a patron of artists, sometimes offering a free meal in exchange for a picture, or occasionally buying their work or facilitating a sale to someone else.
Walter Sickert and his entourage were cited as frequent diners at Stulik’s, but another ‘shepherd’ and his flock, of a rather different character, was Wyndham Lewis and his faction – the incipient Vorticists. William Roberts wrote –
Vorticism was not developed in the gloom of a studio flat but at the Eiffel Tower over a tourney-dos and a bottle of burgundy.
And there they all are in Robert’s painting of around 1961, fronting this chapter. At the front the six seated are Cuthbert Hamilton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells and Edward Wadsworth; the two female Vorticists – Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders, tucked away by the door; and Stulik, himself, and his waiter Joe, placed at the right. The image is a touch sardonic, for by the 1960s Roberts, who, at one time, had denied he ever was a Vorticist,
