Walter Sickert

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Walter Richard Sickert (May 31, 1860 in Munich, Germany – January 22, 1942 in Bath, England) was an English impressionist painter.

His father Oswald was Danish-German and his mother Eleanor was Anglo-Irish; Sickert was a cosmopolitan who favored ordinary people and urban scenes as his subject. He was the son and grandson of painters, but at first sought a career as an actor; he appeared in small parts in Sir Henry Irving's company, before taking up the study of art as assistant to James McNeill Whistler. He later went to Paris and met Edgar Degas, whose innovative use of pictorial space and emphasis on drawing would have a powerful effect on Sickert's own work.

He developed a personal version of impressionism, favoring somber coloration that is sometimes strikingly unnatural in effect. Many of Sickert's early works were portrayals of scenes in London music halls, often depicted from complex and ambiguous points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the audience, perfomer and orchestra is often confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. Isolated rhetorical gestures seem to be reaching out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering out to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme of confused or failed communication between people was to become a regular feature of his art. Sickert also commonly emphasised the patterns of wallpaper and carvings in these buildings, creating abstract decorative arabesques, flattening the three-dimensional space. Many of these pictures connect the artificiality of art itself to the conventions of theatrical performance and painted backdrops. Such music hall and theatrical scenes are strongly influenced by Degas. Many of these works were exhibited at the New English Art Club, a group of French-influenced realist artists with which Sickert was associated. At this period Sickert spent much of his time in France, especially in Dieppe where his mistress, and possibly his illegitimate son, lived.

Just before World War I he championed the avant-garde artists Lucien Pissarro, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. At the same time he set up, with other artists, the Camden Town Group of British painters, named from the district of London in which he lived. This group had been meeting informally since 1905, but was officially established in 1911. It was influenced by Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, but concentrated on scenes of often drab suburban life. Sickert himself said he preferred the kitchen to the drawing room as a scene for paintings. Sickert regularly portrayed figures placed ambiguously on the borderland between respectability and poverty.

In 1907 Sickert became interested in the "Camden town murder", the killing of a local prostitute. He painted several versions of a scene in which a heavy-set man sits in a despairing pose by a bed, while a plump naked woman lies on it. Sometimes he exhibited it with the title What shall we do for the rent? (implying that the man is sitting up worrying about debt while his wife sleeps), sometimes as The Camden Town murder (implying that the man has just killed the woman beside him). This play on multiple interpretations of the same scene was a development of the Victorian genre of the problem picture. These and other works were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range. Many other obese nudes were painted at this time, in which the fleshiness of the figures is connected to the thickness of the paint, devices that were later imitated by Lucien Freud.

Sickert's interest in Victorian narrative genres also influenced his best known work Ennui, in which a couple in a dingy interior gaze abstractedly into empty space,as though they can no longer communicate with each other. In his later work Sickert adapted illustrations by Victorian illustrators such as Georgie Bowers and John Gilbert, taking the scenes out of their context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligibility partly dissolved. He called these paintings his "Echoes". Sickert also executed a number of works in the 1930s based on news photographs, squared up for enlargement, with their pencil grids plainly visible in the finished painting. Seen by many of his contemporaries as evidence of the artist's decline, these works are also the artist's most forward-looking, seeming to prefigure the practices of Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter.

He is considered an eccentric figure of the transition from impressionism to modernism, and as an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century.

One of Sickert's closest friends and supporters was newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, who accumulated the largest single collection of Sickert paintings in the world. This collection, with a private correspondence between Sickert and Beaverbook, is in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Sickert's sister was Helena Swanwick, a feminist and pacifist active in the women's suffrage movement.

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The Ripper theory

In recent years, Sickert's name has been connected with Jack the Ripper. Sickert himself was interested in the crime and believed that he had lodged in the room used by the infamous serial killer, having been told this by his landlady, who suspected a previous lodger. He painted the room, entitling it "Jack the Ripper's bedroom," portraying it as a dark, brooding, almost unintelligible space. The painting is in Manchester City Art Gallery. [1]

In 1976, Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution contended that Sickert had been forced to take part as an accomplice in the Ripper murders. His information was derived from a man who claimed to be Sickert's illegitimate child. From this developed the popular "Royal conspiracy theory". Jean Overton Fuller, in Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (1990), claimed that Sickert was the actual killer instead of just an accomplice. The opinions of Knight and Fuller are no longer widely accepted by other Ripper scholars.

Image:Portrait of a Killer cover.jpgIn 2002, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, presented her theory that Sickert was responsible for the murders. She also believes he committed many other murders. She bases her assertions on DNA comparisons, opinions about Sickert's paintings and sketches, and the suggestion that Sickert had a penis that was deformed from birth, which she claims would make him incapable of sexual intercourse.

Cornwell purchased 31 paintings by Sickert and is said to have destroyed one or more of them searching for Sickert's DNA, which Cornwell denies. She DNA-tested numerous stamps and envelopes she believed to have been licked by Sickert, and compared them to stamps and envelopes from letters claiming to be written by Jack the Ripper. Most of these contained no nuclear DNA evidence at all, which is unsurprising considering how old they are and how they have been treated over the years. She reports that, in one case, the mitochondrial DNA that she assumes is from Sickert cannot be ruled out as being a match to the mitochondrial DNA found in one of the "Jack the Ripper" letters.

Critics of her theory note that the comparisons have only focused on mitochondrial DNA, which, depending on the expert queried, would be shared by between 10% and .1% of the population. Given the number of people who handled the many letters, finding a match to any mitochondrial DNA sample at some point would be highly likely. Critics also note that most, if not all, of the letters are believed by most Ripper experts (including Scotland Yard) to be hoaxes. Even if Cornwell could eventually prove that Sickert wrote one or more of the letters claiming to be from the Ripper, that would not be proof that he actually was the killer.

Cornwell's claim that Sickert had a deformed penis has also been disputed. The artist was known to have several wives and lovers, reportedly resulting in several children (including Joseph Sickert, the man Knight got his Royal Conspiracy theory from). This would seem to make the theory that Sickert could not perform sexually unlikely. Further, the doctor that Sickert visited for his fistula problem did not normally treat penises, but rather was more of a proctologist. Fistulas also can develop on anuses, a fact which would seem to fit the available evidence better than Cornwell's claims that he had a disfigured penis.

Most problematic for Cornwell's theory is the fact that a number of letters from the Sickert family place the artist as vacationing in France for a length of time that overlaps the dates of most of the canonical Ripper murders. Cornwell and her supporters claim that he could have traveled on a ship back to London and then returned to France on all of these occasions, but have shown no evidence that he did so.

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