The dead bodies of murdered women are served up as butcher’s meat in this survey of work by the Victorian painter who almost certainly claimed to the police to be Jack the Ripper

The dead bodies of murdered women are served up as butcher’s meat in this survey of work by the Victorian painter who almost certainly claimed to the police to be Jack the Ripper

Was Walter Sickert the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper? This grimily realist painter has been fingered for the Whitechapel murders by Ripperologists including Patricia Cornwell.

In 1888, this actor and artist – who was born in Munich in 1860 and moved to Britain as a child – appears to have written a series of letters to the police, claiming to be the killer. He put his drawing skills to macabre use in these missives, drawing caricatures of brutal male faces, sketches of men with knives standing over women’s bodies....

In 1907, British art lovers were stunned to discover Jack the Ripper's Bedroom – a dark canvas picturing a black silhouette dimly lit by a few rays of light filtering through the shutters. The painting, whose title and color palette are enough to give you goosebumps, was signed by Walter Sickert. The artist would have drawn his inspiration from his own bedroom. In the early 1900s, he moved to the working-class district of Camden Town in London, where he found his favorite subjects, starting with the many crimes that occurred there. Among these crimes is the murder of a certain Emily Dimmock, a prostitute whose throat was found slit from one ear to the other a few blocks away from his studio.

 

The case resurrected memories of Jack the Ripper throughout the British capital and inspired the artist to create this painting in and from his own bedroom in Camden. Y et, according to the rumors spread by the caretaker of his building, that room also belonged to the infamous serial killer who struck twenty years earlier... The reason for her suspicions? The restless behavior of the previous tenant at the time of the murders in 1888, whose unexpected departure perfectly coincides with the end of the murders. The room, the painter, the recent gruesome murder of Emily Dimmock... it didn’t take more than that for the gossips and fantasies to be fueled.

 

A century later, this theory has been confirmed by the American novelist Patricia Cornwell in two books published in 2002 and 2017. After an investigation that costed the author several million dollars according to her, the comparative analysis of Walter Sickert’s paintings and Jack the Ripper’s handwritten letters revealed a match in their DNA. It also allowed this criminology-loving author to discover that, in addition to their DNA or their flat, the two men also shared the same stationery and the same nickname “Nemo” ...