Date: 05-05-2002
Owning Institution: Tate Britain, London
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 20th Century          

Today is the first Sunday of the air show season, with displays taking place at Abingdon in Oxfordshire, Breighton in North Yorkshire and at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, where the Jubilee Air Show will feature a number of stunts and fly-pasts involving vintage aeroplanes. This week’s aeronautically appropriate picture is Walter Richard Sickert’s muted homage to Amelia Earhart, the first woman to emulate Charles Lindbergh’s feat of flying solo across the Atlantic. Entitled Miss Earhart’s Arrival, it was painted in 1932, almost immediately after the successful conclusion of her pioneering flight, and can be seen at Tate Britain.

The picture is among other things a wry comment on the English weather’s dislikable habit of dampening festive spirits. Huddled against the cold and drenched by heavy rain, a stoical crowd of onlookers all but blocks from view the object of their adulation. On close inspection of the picture, Miss Earhart’s profile is visible – wearing a leather flying cap, her face is to be found between the hat of the man in the blue overcoat and the umbrella raised aloft in the upper-right corner – but only just. She is being shepherded away from under the wing of an aircraft, doubtless in the direction of some more official reception party, and has almost disappeared from view. The celebrated aviatrix seems both distant and a little distorted, as in an unflattering snapshot. The painter has reduced her to something like a caricature, or a shrunken head. He may have wanted to convey the way in which, under the glare of publicity, people often become oddly unlike themselves.

Having already flown across the Atlantic once, as a passenger, Amelia Earhart had set out on her solo flight from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, on 20 May 1932. Her intended destination had been Paris, but she had wandered slightly off course and been forced by mechanical difficulties to land her plane, a modified Lockheed Vega, in a field near Londonderry in Northern Ireland. As she climbed from the cockpit, she later recounted, a man came up to her. “Where am I?” she asked him. “In Gallagher’s pasture,” he replied. The journey, which had taken 14 hours and 56 minutes, ensured Earhart’s place in the record books. Not only had she become the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone, but the first person of either sex to fly it twice. She had also broken the speed record for the crossing. The day after her forced landing in Ireland she was flown to Hanworth Aerodrome, near London, arriving in the middle of a deluge. It was the wettest May in England for 160 years. The Daily Sketch, which dubbed her “the new Lindbergh”, decided the event was front-page news. “Welcome ‘Lady Lindy’”! proclaimed its headline: “Heroine of the air reaches London in a storm.''

Sickert was in his early seventies at the time. The most gifted British artist of his generation, he was also a lively self-promoter, who corresponded indefatigably with the editor of The Times and even in old age rarely missed a chance to catch the public eye. He immediately realised that Amelia Earhart’s fame could be useful in enhancing his own. Within a week of her arrival in England a special private view had been arranged at the Beaux Arts Gallery, to show “Sickert’s Great New Painting” of the event. The picture, which was based on the same photograph used by the Daily Sketch in its front-page report, was itself reproduced in the newspapers, along with the startling information that it had taken just five days to complete – only four more days than Amelia Earhart’s crossing. Hacks wondered whether this might in itself constitute some new kind of record. Those who saw the picture when it was first exhibited noticed that the squaring-up lines used by the artist to help him transcribe the composition of the original photograph on to his canvas were still visible. Sickert subsequently removed these manifest indications of haste.

Some of the artist’s contemporaries criticised him for his opportunistic choice of subject matter, others for his practice of basing paintings on photographs. He defended himself vigorously on both counts, arguing that at least he, unlike so many other painters of his day, created pictures that had (italics) meaningful subject matter. “We are suffering from too much subservience to what is called expert opinion,” he declaimed. “That painting must have no subject, must not be literary, has been so dinned into our ears, that we have forgotten that the choice lies only between an interesting and an uninteresting subject.” (The “expert opinion” he had in mind was that of the critic Roger Fry, who argued that the sole criterion on which paintings should be judged was their formal quality). As for taking inspiration from photography: “We have no right to ask a painter for an account of his methods. They are made up of three elements, memory, invention and concrete objects. The latter may be merely suggestive.” In taking up the “suggestion” offered by a  photograph, the artist was in any event only following in the footsteps of illustrious French painters such as Degas (to whom the younger Sickert had once been very close). There was nothing inherently disreputable about the practice.

Painting Miss Earhart’s Arrival may have struck Sickert’s contemporaries as a very up-to-the-minute thing to do – which in one sense, of course, it was. But for all the topicality of his chosen theme, Sickert was also harking back to the past, and continuing what had been his lifelong conversation with an earlier generation of French avant-garde artists. He was taking up a challenge laid down by Degas, who once told him that it is more skilful to conjure up the impression of a crowd with a few true-to-life figures than 100 lined up as in a school photograph. He was also perhaps remembering the example of Van Gogh, whose slashing depictions of rain had greatly impressed him when shown in London 20 years before. “Blond dashes of water at an angle of 45 degrees from right to left and suddenly, across these, a black squirt,” Sickert had observed at the time. “The discomfort, the misery, the hopelessness of rain are there.”