Dear Reader,
Despite the fact that there is no possible way to bring the murderer who preyed on vulnerable, impoverished women in East London in the autumn of 1888 to justice, “Jack the Ripper” remains the coveted prize of true-crime obsessives and armchair detectives worldwide. Never mind the dearth of physical evidence preserved for posterity or the impossible challenge of sorting fact from error in long-ago police reports. “After all,” a character muses in Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Ripper-inspired 1913 novel The Lodger, “the monster must be somewhere.”1
For generations, fascination with the terrible mystery has led investigators to consider all kinds of suspects and evidence—sometimes turning into suspects themselves. In his 1976 bestseller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, journalist Stephen Knight implicates English painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942), who twenty years after the slayings titled a brooding work Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Sickert claimed that his landlady believed she had let his room to the Ripper in the 1880s, and she even gave him the name of the tenant which he wrote down in a book. He subsequently lent the book to a friend, and it was destroyed during the Blitz.2
Knight declares that Sickert’s oft-repeated story about his landlady was nothing but a feint which allowed the artist to channel his “unending need to chatter on about the Ripper” and the crimes he had really played a part in committing. Nevertheless, Knight marvels, this cover story “had a remarkable effect” on pop culture, supposedly inspiring Marie Lowndes’ popular 1911 short story The Lodger and her subsequent expansion of it into a novel in 1913.3 The Lodger was adapted as a comedic stage play in 1915 and as a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927; Gary Coville and Patrick Luciano identified an entire Lodger-based genre of Ripper-related entertainment by 1999.4
But Marie Lowndes’ own account of how she came by the idea for her story doesn’t involve Sickert: in her memoirs, she recalls that at a London dinner party around 1910 she met “a man who told me that a butler and a lady’s maid, who had been in his parents’ service…were convinced Jack the Ripper had spent the night in their house before and after he committed the most horrible of his murders.”5 This differs from the version of Sickert’s story recounted by biographer Osbert Sitwell, in which Sickert’s own landlady—not former servants of his parents—rented to the Ripper.
Truly there is no stone unturned in the field of “Ripperology”: as other researchers have pointed out, a variant of the “lodger” story appeared in London newspapers even amidst the killing spree in October 1888.6 A year later, psychiatrist Lyttleton Forbes Winslow showed journalists the bloodstained boots of another suspicious lodger reported by a landlord friend (like those in Lowndes’ later story, the boots were rubber-soled for noiseless footsteps).7 The Ripper had to live somewhere, and Londoners eager to solve the case came forward to supply persons of interest.8
But of all the people who told versions of the lodger story within living memory of the crimes, why has posterity latched onto Walter Sickert as a suspect? Although friends of the charming Sickert—who the future Mrs. Winston Churchill told her daughter was “the most handsome and compelling man she had ever met”—acknowledged he had a Ripper “craze,” no one seems to have seriously considered his involvement in the crimes until a man claiming to be his illegitimate son began talking about a link in the 1970s.9
Some of Sickert’s most famous artwork certainly scores high on the Creepiness Index; in addition to Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, he titled a number of paintings and drawings from the same era Camden Town Murder to capitalize on a then-recent (and still unsolved) local murder.10
None of these paintings depict actual violence—Bedroom is a murky view through a doorway, and the Murders and Camden Town Nudes are a series of undressed women on iron bedsteads with fully clothed men looking on—but they have unsettled viewers nonetheless. “The girls have no recognisable personality, no real faces, no real individuality,” wrote critic Waldemar Januszczak in 1993, “they are bodies to be used.”11 Even the Victoria and Albert Museum in London avers that Sickert “seems to have had an almost morbid obsession with sexual violence.”12
The most recent and by far the most dogged champion of the Sickert-as-Ripper theory is crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. On a walking tour of London’s Ripper sites in 2001, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard tipped Cornwell off to Sickert’s Camden Town Murder series. Appalled, she began to dig into Sickert as a suspect.13 Marie Lowndes’ story hinges on suspicious landlords not quite getting up the nerve to confront their well-paying tenant; Cornwell hypothesizes how a conspiracy of silence could surround a respected and well-connected artist.
In 2002, she published Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed, in which she attempted to use modern forensic techniques to obtain evidence proving that Sickert wrote a number of the taunting “Ripper letters” which poured into newspapers and police stations for years following the murders.14 The effort met with skepticism and derision among “Ripperologists” as well as Sickert scholars, and in 2017, she substantially rewrote her earlier book and released it as Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert. It includes a section in which she responds directly to her critics, acknowledging the shortcomings of some of her earlier analyses but maintaining her belief in Sickert’s guilt.15 “Worst of all,” though, she writes of her earlier work, “I fell into the trap of being a bit too adamant. That wasn’t wise, and I won’t make the same mistake again.”16
So the mystery endures. As disturbing as some of the Sickert’s paintings may be, he likely never stayed in Jack the Ripper’s bedroom. And we will almost certainly never know who did.
Sincerely,
Miss Remember
APPENDIX A: Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, Walter Sickert
Walter Sickert, Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, 1906-1907, oil on canvas, 20” x 16”, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK. Viewed online at ArtUK.org: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/jack-the-rippers-bedroom-206026.
APPENDIX B: Excerpt from Shields Daily Gazette, October 16, 1888
“The Whitechapel Murders.” Shields Daily Gazette [Durham, UK], October 16, 1888, p. 3. Accessed online through British Library Newspapers [Gale].
APPENDIX C: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (United Kingdom: Gainsborough Pictures, 1927), accessed online at YouTube.com.
SOURCES
PRIMARY
CBC News, “Cornwell donates art by Jack the Ripper suspect,” August 20, 2006, https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cornwell-donates-art-by-jack-the-ripper-suspect-1.619929
Cornwell, Patricia. Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed. New York: Putnam, 2002.
Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert. Seattle, WA: Thomas & Mercer, 2017.
Fuller, Jean Overton. Sickert and the Ripper Crimes: The 1888 Ripper Murders and the artist Walter Richard Sickert. Oxford, UK: Mandrake, 1990.
Gibbons, Fiachra. “Does this painting by Walter Sickert reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper?” The Guardian. December 8, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2001/dec/08/art.artsfeatures.
Harvard Art Museums, “Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist is Established at the Harvard Art Museum’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies,” November 19, 2008, https://harvardartmuseums.org/about/press-media/patricia-cornwell-conservation-scientist-is-established-at-the-harvard-art-museums-straus-center-for-conservation-and-technical-studies
Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. United Kingdom: Gainsborough Pictures, 1927. Accessed online at YouTube.com.
Knight, Stephen. Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. London: Grafton, 1988. Originally published 1976. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780586046524.
“Why Sickert denied Ripper tale.” Letter to the editor. The Sunday Times. July 2, 1978.
Lilly, Marjorie. Sickert: The Painter and His Circle. London: Elek Books, 1971.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Lodger. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935 [originally published in book form 1913]. Accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/lodger0000mari.
The Merry Wives of Westminster. London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1946. Accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/merrywivesofwest0000mari/.
May, David. “Jack the Ripper ‘solution’ was a hoax, man confesses.” The Sunday Times [London, UK]. June 18, 1978.
Sickert, Walter. Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. 1906-1907. Oil on canvas. 20” x 16”. Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK. Viewed online at ArtUK.org: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/jack-the-rippers-bedroom-206026.
The Spoilt Beauty. 1908 (printed). Etching print on paper. 345mm x 243mm. Viewed online at the Victoria & Albert Museum online collections: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O71987/the-spoilt-beauty-la-belle-print-sickert-walter-richard/the-spoilt-beauty-print-sickert-walter-richard/.
Sitwell, Osbert, ed. A Free House! or the Artist as Craftsman: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012. Accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/freehouseorartis0000sick.
Soames, Mary. Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/clementinechurch00soam.
Sturgis, Matthew. “Making a killing from the Ripper.” The Sunday Times. November 3, 2002, p.9.
Walter Sickert: A Life. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/waltersickertlif0000stur.
“The Whitechapel Murders.” Shields Daily Gazette [Durham, UK]. October 16, 1888, p. 3. Accessed online through British Library Newspapers [Gale].
“The Whitechapel Murders.” Weekly Dispatch [London, UK]. September 22, 1889.
Wickes, David, director. Jack the Ripper. Extract from episode 6, “The Highest in the Land?” Aired August 17, 1973. BBC Entertainment. Clip from Adam Curtis on BBC.co.uk, March 31, 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01wk34j.
SECONDARY
Baron, Wendy. Sickert: Paintings and Drawings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Coville, Gary and Patrick Lucanio. Jack the Ripper: His Life and Crimes in Popular Entertainment. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999.
Curtis, Adam. “Suspicious Minds.” The Medium and the Message (BBC Blogs). April 2, 2014. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/8b69a786-56d5-317b-b8f4-461f6ebc1b70.
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. Jack the Ripper and the London Press. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Januszczak, Waldemar. “The immediacy of Walter Sickert’s dark paintings leaves Waldemar Januszczak gasping for breath.” The Sunday Times. July 25, 2004.
Jones, Jonathan. “Walter Sickert review – serial killer, fantasist or self-hater? This hellish, brilliant show only leaves questions.” The Guardian. April 26, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/26/walter-sickert-review-serial-killer-tate-britain-london-show-women-victorian-painter.
Mugan, Chris. “The enduring mystery of Walter Sickert.” ArtUK. May 19, 2022. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-enduring-mystery-of-walter-sickert.
Ryder, Stephen. “Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer.” Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Accessed May 7th, 2024. https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-pamandsickert.html.
Ryder, ed. “Casebook: The Lodger.” Casebook: Jack the Ripper. https://www.casebook.org/suspects/lodger.html.
Stephen Ryder, ed. “Mission Statement,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper. https://www.casebook.org/about_the_casebook/mission.html.
Tickner, Lisa. “Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime.” In Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/lisa-tickner-walter-sickert-the-camden-town-murder-and-tabloid-crime-r1104355.
Vanderlinden, Wolf. “The Art of Murder.” Ripper Notes 39 (February 2002). Republished online at Casebook: Jack the Ripper: https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-artofmurder.html.
Warkentin, Elyssa. Introduction to Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger, ed. Warkentin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015. Accessed online through Cambridge Scholars Press: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/resources/pdfs/978-1-4438-7818-0-sample.pdf.
Wright, Barnaby, ed. Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes. London: Courtauld Gallery, 2007.
Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger [New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935; originally published 1913], 118.
Osbert Sitwell, ed., A Free House! or the Artist as Craftsman: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, xl.
Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London: Grafton, 1988; originally published 1976), 45-46, accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780586046524/page/46/mode/2up?q=remarkable.
Gary Coville and Patrick Luciano, Jack the Ripper: His Life and Crimes in Popular Entertainment (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999), 3.
Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Merry Wives of Westminster [London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1946], 171, accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/merrywivesofwest0000mari/page/170/mode/2up.
“The Whitechapel Murders,” Shields Daily Gazette [Durham, UK], October 16, 1888, p. 3. Accessed online through British Library Newspapers [Gale]. See also Stephen Ryder, ed., “Casebook: The Lodger,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/suspects/lodger.html.
“The Whitechapel Murders.” Weekly Dispatch [London, UK]. September 22, 1889. I first came across this article referenced in crime novelist and Ripper researcher Patricia Cornwell’s Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle, WA: Thomas & Mercer, 2017), pages 376-378. It also appears with an erroneous publication date in her earlier edition of the book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (New York: Putnam, 2002), pages 284-285.
The colorful Dr. Winslow was involved in a number of other high-profile Victorian criminal cases: see Winslow, Recollections of Forty Years (London: John Ouseley, Ltd., 1910), accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/recollectionsoff00winsiala/mode/2up.
Lowndes moved to London in 1888 determined to be a writer and may have read and absorbed details of the various Ripper-related stories that appeared in the papers (Elyssa Warkentin, Introduction to Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger, ed. Warkentin [Camrbidge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015], xv).
Even putting aside the lodger lead, historian L. Perry Curtis analyzed 241 letters to the editor published in five London newspapers during the Ripper’s killing spree in 1888 and found that almost 60% of them dealt with either suggestions to police about how the killer could be caught (41%) or who the killer might be (18%) (L. Perry Curtis, “Responses to the Ripper News: Letters to the Editor,”pp. 238-252 in Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001]). Lowndes includes a few fictionalized such letters in the novel form of The Lodger (Lowndes 1935 [1913], 117-118; 121-122).
See note 1 for more details on Joseph Gorman, the alleged son of Sickert.
On the Churchill connection, see Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 24, accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/clementinechurch00soam. Neither Clementine’s verdict on his painting (“well, Mr. Sickert, you seem to see everything through dirty eyes”) nor his later vandalization of her field hockey stick (he thought the sport too violent for young ladies) stopped the two from striking up a friendship or Sickert from giving Winston Churchill painting lessons decades later.
Artist Marjorie Lilly rented studio space in the same building as Sickert in 1917 and recalled that “he had two fervent crazes…crime and the princes of the Church; crime personified by Jack the Ripper, the Church by Anthony Trollope” (Lilly, Sickert: The Painter and His Circle [London: Elek Books, 1971], 15).
English biographer Jean Overton Fuller wrote in her 1990 Sickert and the Ripper Crimes that her mother’s friend Florence Pash, who had run a painting school with Sickert, confessed in 1948 that Sickert “knew who Jack the Ripper was” and had created “paintings of bleeding, mutilated corpses, which he had done from his memory” (Fuller, Sickert and the Ripper Crimes [Oxford, UK: Mandrake, 1990], 11-12). The first published rumor of a secret cache of violent Sickert images appears in Donald McCormick, The Identity of Jack the Ripper (London: Arrow, 1970; first published 1959), 170. I haven’t been able to find a 1959 edition of this book to see whether the claim appeared then or only in the revised 1970 version, which, as Matthew Sturgis pointed out in his 2005 biography, was after Joseph Gorman began to circulate stories about Sickert in 1969.
Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 364. Sickert’s alternate title for one of these paintings, in which a naked woman lies prone on a bed next to a downcast, fully-clothed man, her head turned to the wall, was What Shall We Do for the Rent? (Baron, 131). Sickert seems to have enjoyed retitling paintings to cause an uproar: after the outbreak of WWI, he dubbed a 1912 painting of a naked woman and a clothed man The Prussians in Belgium (presumably capitalizing on stories of sexual violence perpetrated against Belgian women by occupying German troops). See also Lisa Tickner, “Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime,” in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/lisa-tickner-walter-sickert-the-camden-town-murder-and-tabloid-crime-r1104355.
Waldemar Januszczak, “The immediacy of Walter Sickert’s dark paintings leaves Waldemar Januszczak gasping for breath.” The Sunday Times [London, UK], July 25, 2004.
What the V&A sees as an act of “sexual violence” in Sickert’s print The Spoilt Beauty, Sickert expert Wendy Baron reads as a coquettish woman relaxing on the lap of an indulgent suitor (Baron 2006, 75).
Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (New York: Putnam, 2002), 11. “I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert’s works,” she writes, “But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women.” Later she concedes “he was a talented artist whose work is respected but not necessarily enjoyed.” (Cornwell 2002, 54). It’s all a matter of taste, of course: Wendy Baron describes Sickert as a “painter’s painter,” a master of technique who can be “best appreciated by those who have struggled with the same [artistic] problems” (Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, 1).
For Cornwell’s paper analyses claiming that some of the “Ripper” letters were written on Sickert’s stationery, see Cornwell 2002, 171-175; Cornwell, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Seattle, WA: Thomas & Mercer, 2017), 247-253. For Sturgis’ response, see Sturgis 2005, 639-640.
Perhaps the most unfair criticism leveled at Cornwell is the accusation that she cut up a Sickert painting in order find DNA. Cornwell traces this claim to an ABC news clip from 2001 showing her forensic team handling a painting with a hole in it, which she maintains was caused by dry rot from improper storage before she purchased it (Cornwell 2017, 493).
In 2006, she donated a number of Sickert works to the Harvard Art Museum (CBC News, “Cornwell donates art by Jack the Ripper suspect,” August 20, 2006, https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cornwell-donates-art-by-jack-the-ripper-suspect-1.619929) and endowed a million-dollar conservation position there in 2008 (Harvard Art Museums, “Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist is Established at the Harvard Art Museum’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies,” November 19, 2008, https://harvardartmuseums.org/about/press-media/patricia-cornwell-conservation-scientist-is-established-at-the-harvard-art-museums-straus-center-for-conservation-and-technical-studies).
Interestingly, Cornwell was led to Jack the Ripper by her support for the Historic Jamestowne foundation which, since the ‘90s, has been uncovering the archaeological remains of the first permanent English settlement in the New World (Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed [New York: Putnam, 2002], 8). Forensic science techniques have actually been more successful figuring out what happened at the Jamestown Colony in Virginia 400 years ago than in London 140 years ago. Witness the discovery of “Jane,” the remains of a young woman which displayed evidence of survival cannibalism perpetrated during the colony’s desperate winter of 1609-10 (Historic Jamestowne Foundation, “Jane and Forensics,” HistoricJamestowne.org, https://historicjamestowne.org/archaeology/jane/forensics/).
Cornwell 2017, 492.
Interesting read!