THE STRANGE CASE OF WALTER SICKERT AND JACK THE RIPPER
explores the longstanding association of artist Walter Sickert’s name with the Ripper murders of 1888, tracing the stages by which one of the most important British painters of his generation became linked to a ghoulish story deeply embedded in our cultural psyche.
As a major exhibition devoted to Walter Sickert opens at Tate Britain, art historian BILLY ROUGH explores the longstanding association of the artist’s name with the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, tracing the stages by which one of the most important British painters of his generation became linked to a ghoulish story deeply embedded in our cultural psyche.
Whitechapel, London, the autumn of 1888. Through the midnight streets stalks a dark figure, wrapped in a long, checkered coat.
As the secretive figure makes his way along Copenhagen Street, he attracts the attention of a group of young girls. Talk of “Jack” is in the air and strangers are viewed with suspicion.
The terrified girls scatter, screaming, “Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper!”
The figure moves silently on, through Kings Cross, toward Hampstead, sinking back into the shadows.
The story is intriguing. Had these girls actually come face to face with the notorious Jack? What’s curious about the encounter is that we actually know exactly who that figure in the checkered coat was – as he gleefully admitted to it. He was a man who would later come to be infamously connected to the crimes of the Ripper: the artist Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). It’s a simple, if odd, story.
It has a curious legacy and, directly or indirectly, has inspired several books, movies and even a graphic novel.
Its very existence has even come to imply an admission of guilt on the part of its protagonist.
Recently, Sickert’s name has once again been linked with that of Jack the Ripper. Royal scandals, Freemasonry conspiracies and even his own paintings have been scrutinised for Dan Brown-style clues. But the true story of Sickert and the Ripper is just as remarkable and complicated as any conspiracy theory. It is a tale littered with strange coincidences, mistaken identities, unreliable narrators, and deliberate misdirection, a potent mix of myth, legend and hoax. It also illustrates how a simple anecdote can, in the right circumstances, develop into an urban legend.
Robert Emmons first mentioned the Copenhagen Street story in his book The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert (1941) and it was likely told by Sickert to the author directly. Having previously been employed as an actor, Sickert was a born performer, and his anecdotes were a favourite at his dinner parties at Mornington Crescent and Bathampton, and even at Winston Churchill’s Chartwell.
It was repeated over 30 years later in Denys Sutton’s biography Walter Sickert
(1976) with one curious change. Sutton claims it wasn’t the girls who exclaimed “Jack the Ripper”; rather it was Sickert who introduced himself as Jack, which prompted the girls to flee in terror. It’s a significant and damning alteration; an “odd story,” says Sutton, “quite in keeping with his theatrical nature.” Matthew Sturgis’s Walter Sickert: A Life
(2005) returned the story to Emmons’s original, but with the addition that it happened as Sickert made his way home through Kings Cross.
Consider this simple story told four times, each with minor shifts and additions to colour its telling. Add my own recounting of the tale and you have a fifth. I’m as guilty as Emmons, Sutton and Sturgis, and Sickert himself, of wanting to tell a good story.
THE ROYAL CONSPIRACY
How did Sickert’s name come to be connected to the Ripper crimes? He was certainly never considered a Ripper suspect during his lifetime; in fact, his name only emerged in relation to the murders in the early 1970s, initially via the 1973 BBC TV series Jack the Ripper. Across six episodes, the actors Strat
IT ILLUSTRATES HOW A SIMPLE ANECDOTE CAN DEVELOP INTO AN URBAN LEGEND