Walter Sickert

Walter Richard Sickert (May 31, 1860 - January 22, 1942) was an English impressionist painter. His father was Danish-German and his mother Anglo-Irish; Sickert was a cosmopolitan who favored ordinary people and scenes as his subject.

Although he was the son and grandson of painters, Sickert at first sought a career as an actor, appearing 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 studied with Edgar Degas.

He became an impressionist painter, but one with strong overtones of modernism. Indeed, just before World War I he championed the careers of modernists Lucien Pissarro[?], Jacob Epstein[?], Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. He said he preferred the kitchen to the drawing room as a scene for paintings, but he also showed the influence of Degas in his many paintings of music hall and theatrical scenes.

Degas also influenced him in using photographs as the basis for paintings, and in his later career Sickert used photographs and reworkings of Victorian paintings almost exclusively. He is considered an eccentric but influential figure of the transition from impressionism to modernism.

The Ripper Connection

In recent years, Sickert's name has been connected with Jack the Ripper. In 1976, Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (re-released in 1984), contended that Sickert had been forced to take part in a coverup of the Duke of Clarence, a son of Queen Victoria who was said to have been the Ripper. This theme was later taken up by Jean Overton Fuller in Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (1990).

One of Sickert's closest friends and supporter, was newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook who accumulated the largest single collection of Sickert paintings in the world. This collection, along with a large amount of private correspondence between Sickert and Lord Beaverbook, are in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery[?] in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

In 2002, crime novelist[?] Patricia Cornwell, in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed(2002), presented her theory that Sickert was responsible for the Whitehall serial murders in the late 19th century. She also believes he may have committed other murders.

In her investigation, Ms. 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 stated that she obtained DNA from a postage stamp licked by Sickert and one by Jack the Ripper from a letter written to a London newspaper. At the time of her research and book publication, Ms. Cornwell was not aware of the collection of Sickert documents at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery that includes many envelopes where the saliva from licking by Sickert would easily provide DNA. Ms. Cornwell is continuing to finance further DNA testing in pursuit of her hypothesis. In recent talks, she has claimed new evidence of a connection between stationery (assumed to be the envelopes and letters by Sickert to Lord Beaverbrook of which she was formally notified) and letters held by Scotland Yard said to have been from Jack the Ripper.

External Links

• Biography of Walter Sickert (http://www.wetcanvas.com/Museum/Artists/s/Walter_Sickert/)
• Artistic Legacy of Sickert (http://www.artsworld.com/art-architecture/biographies/s-u/walter-richard-sickert)
• "Cornwell v. Sickert: Portrait of the Artist as a Serial Killer" (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2002-11) by Joseph Phelan, thorough debunking of Cornwell's theories, particularly noting her missing the influence of Degas on Sickert.
• Patricia Cornwell's web site (http://www.patriciacornwell.com)