Phillips's Well-Drawn Tale of Two Cities

Toulouse-Lautrec's "The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge," left, and Degas' "Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen" from "Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910" at the Phillips Collection. (Phillips Collection Via Associated Press)

Poor Walter Sickert.

First he gets slandered as a slasher, and not just any slasher. In 2002, mystery writer Patricia Cornwell (best known for her 16 Dr. Kay Scarpetta mysteries) published a whole book that claimed the so-so painter was really . . . Jack the Ripper .

Now Sickert finds himself smack in the middle of "Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910" at the Phillips Collection, where the pressure is too much.

Sickert has a problem here. His problem is his pictures. Memorable and moody though some of them may be, more are merely clunky. It isn't really fair, but Sickert in the Phillips's show is embarrassingly out-painted. The great Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and the also-great Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) seldom left a clunky mark, and Sickert, squeezed between them, ends up getting squashed.

Still, he ought to be here, for this exhibit tells a story. It has cliches to puncture and surprises to reveal, and Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) is crucial to its plot.

This is how we meet him. Sickert, an assistant to James McNeill Whistler, is working as a courier (accompanying the picture now called "Whistler's Mother" to the Paris Salon) when he first encounters Degas in 1883. Sickert is, well, awe-struck, and Degas is much taken by this unusual young man.

Sickert wasn't just a painter. He had also spent four years as one of Sir Henry Irving's touring English actors, and Degas, as his pictures show, also loved the stage. The sight of Degas' pictures gave Sickert a new mission. Hereafter he would be Degas' unofficial ambassador to England, his disciple and promoter. In becoming such, young Sickert would also help destroy the imaginary barrier that is still thought to exist between French and English art.

Italian art is about God; French art is about art; English art, instead, is merely about living well. Generalities like these, a commonplace in art-talk, are undone by this show.

The case it makes is this: When it came to advanced painting, to urban advanced painting, Paris and London weren't really far apart.

They were nodes on the same network. Degas soon would be a celebrity in England. Whistler thrived in France. During the Franco-Prussian War the impressionist Camille Pissarro was a refugee in Norwood, a drab south London suburb, and though Pissarro soon went home, other French painters stayed. Jacques-Joseph-James Tissot, for instance, a star of the exhibit, spent 11 years in London. Henri Fantin-Latour spent an English summer in Sunbury-on-Thames. Claude Monet, when flush, preferred the best hotels. His shimmering pictures of the Thames were painted while he stayed in a suite in the Savoy.

Whistler, we know, was at ease in both great cities. So was William Rothenstein, an Englishman from Bradford whose portraits are among the treats of this display.

In "Toulouse-Lautrec in Montmartre," a big show seen last year at the National Gallery of Art, the Frenchman was presented as a most Parisian painter. The curator of that show, art historian Richard Thomson, is co-curator of this one. In the present exhibition, which comes from Tate Britain in London, he has another point to make: French and British painters crossed the Channel all the time.