New Statesman: Small is beautiful: to Walter Sickert, the British art scene was dominated by snobber

Walter Sickert married three times. His first wife, Ellen, was the daughter of Richard Cobden, scourge of the corn laws and founder of the Manchester school of economic liberalism. In later years, when living and painting in Camden Town, close to the Cobden memorial outside Mornington Crescent Station, Sickert would casually tell friends: "Meet me under the statue of my first father-in-law." Sickert never actually knew Cobden--who died in 1865, when Sickert was still a toddler--but he always valued his connection with the radical champion of free trade, and not just as a name to drop.

It must be admitted that Sickert's political views, though sometimes strongly expressed, were not very firmly held. He happily subscribed to--and, indeed, wrote for--both the Manchester Guardian and the high-Tory Morning Post. He admired Lenin and approved of Hitler, at least as a draughtsman. Some have been encouraged to consider him a socialist on the grounds that he deprecated the drawing room as a subject for art and--in such works as the celebrated Ennui or the Camden Town Murder series--depicted the dramas of vulgar London life with an unexampled candour and directness. But there was never any suggestion that Sickert wished to change the lot of his shabby, downtrodden subjects. He liked them as they were.

In art politics, however, Sickert remained a firm adherent to the Cobdenite tradition. He was an apostle of free trade. His views have an interesting resonance today, if only because they are so out of tune with current thinking, or at least current practice. He distrusted, for example, all state support for contemporary art. On a political level, he deplored a system that taxed the charwoman and the labourer to provide cultural amenities and rewards for the better-off. And on an artistic level, he deplored the works that such a system produced.

The prejudice developed early. As a child growing up in Munich (where his father had a job as an illustrator on a popular comic weekly), Sickert was horrified by the colossal statue of "Bavaria"--represented as a 60ft-high bronze female holding a wreath above her head--which dominated the Theresienwiese. Commissioned by Ludwig I, it was (Sickert claimed in later years) the thing that first convinced him of the folly of state sponsorship of the arts.

However, it was not just ill-conceived public sculpture that affronted him. In his own professional life in England, Sickert consistently championed what he called "small paintings for small patrons" against the claims of large-scale works intended only for exhibition in public galleries. He urged his fellow artists to paint small, to sell cheaply and to sell in quantity, either whole-sale to dealers or direct to modest collectors.

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Sickert adopted both ploys at different moments. Sometimes he sold his canvases to gallery owners, unseen, in roped-up bundles. At other times he acted as his own dealer--even though he found the business of wrapping up sold pictures with brown paper and string particularly troublesome. Always he espoused the doctrine of "small profits and quick returns" as the best way for a painter to build up a solid and dependable following. It was, he liked to point out, the course that had laid the foundations for the success of the impressionists in France. And as Sickert aimed to adopt and adapt the techniques, vision and subject matter of the impressionists--most particularly Degas--for a British public, so he thought it a good idea to adopt their commercial practices as well.

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Sickert would not have been a fan of the Turner Prize. He distrusted all awards and government schemes for the "encouragement" of modern painting, considering that they offered disproportionate rewards to the few, put too much power into the hands of "self-appointed critics and gallery directors" and falsified the true market value of pictures. Far from helping either art or artists, prizes hindered both. They led to "a heated competition among colleagues for gambling prizes", rather than to more fruitful dialogue, both among artists and between artists and their public. During the First World War, when it was suggested to him that some state effort should be made to support the arts during the time of crisis, he dismissed the idea. "Art is all right," he said. "It will look after itself. I have always believed art requires no more encouragement than do[es], say, sunshine or philoprogenitiveness."

Sales, however, are a necessary part of the equation. And though "small patrons" might be desirable, they were in short supply. Throughout the Edwardian era, art collecting was considered a rich man's game. Sickert recognised that the British art scene--then as perhaps now--was dominated less by a love of art than by a regard for snobbery, exclusiveness, money and fashion. It was, in his phrase, a "Gooseocracy", presided over by "Supergeese", society women with more money than taste.

He adopted several ploys to subvert this established order. He held informal "at homes" in his shabby Fitzrovia studio to introduce new customers to his work. And on the wider scene, he was forever urging the artistic groups to which he belonged to hang their pictures by lot, or in alphabetical order, to escape from the lures of cliquishness and the caprices of selection juries and hanging committees. Sickert was an enthusiastic supporter of the Allied Artists Association, an exhibiting society set up in 1908, which held its vast alphabetically hung shows in the Royal Albert Hall. All members were--on payment of their modest subscription--entitled to exhibit their work. When, at an early meeting, it was suggested that the "best" pictures should be given special prominence, Sickert memorably interjected: "Sir, for the purposes of this association, there are no good pictures and no bad pictures. There are only pictures by shareholders."

Although some critics found the AAA shows (like their Parisian counterparts at the Salon des Independants) more like an auction-house repository than an art exhibition, Sickert loved their zestful admixture. He also enjoyed the subversiveness of the enterprise. He liked to describe the AAA as "a working object lesson in socialism", asking rhetorically: "Is it not a solvent, going concern founded by the poor to help themselves?"

Sickert's enthusiastic espousal of such schemes was, however, underpinned by the knowledge that, even on the jostling walls of the Albert Hall, his paintings would always stand out, in the originality of their vision, the daring of their subject matter and the personal quality of their execution. The "best" pictures achieve a special prominence on their own. And Sickert's pictures were, very often, the best.

Matthew Sturgis's Walter Sickert: a life is published by HarperCollins on 24 January ([pounds sterling]30).

"Walter Sickert: drawing is the thing" is at the Southampton City Art Gallery (023 8083 2277) until 20 March

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Arts Editor: Rosie Millard