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. Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects.

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Jack the Ripper theories 3 See also 4 Notes 5 Bibliography 6 External links

[edit] Life and work

His father, Oswald Sickert, was a Danish-German artist^[1] and his mother Eleanor was the illegitimate daughter of astronomer Richard Sheepshanks. The family left Munich to settle in England at the time of the Great Exhibition, Oswald's work having been recommended by Freiin Rebecca von Kreusser to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery at the time. ^[2] The young Sickert was sent to University College School from 1870-1871 before transferring to King's College School, Wimbledon, where he studied until the age of 18. Though he was the son and grandson of painters, he 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 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, favouring somber colouration. Following Degas' advice, Sickert painted in the studio, working from drawings and memory as an escape from "the tyranny of nature".^[3] Sickert's earliest major 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, performer and orchestra becomes confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. The isolated rhetorical gestures of singers and actors seem to reach out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme of confused or failed communication between people appears frequently in his art.

By emphasising the patterns of wallpaper and architectural decorations, Sickert created abstract decorative arabesques and flattened the three-dimensional space. His music hall pictures, like Degas' paintings of dancers and café-concert entertainers, connect the artificiality of art itself to the conventions of theatrical performance and painted backdrops. 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 founded, 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.^[4] Sickert regularly portrayed figures placed ambiguously on the borderland between respectability and poverty. From 1908-1912 and again from 1915-1918 Sickert was an influential teacher at Westminster School of Art.

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. ^[5] Sometimes Sickert exhibited the picture 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 adapted by Lucian 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 artists such as Georgie Bowers and John Gilbert, taking the scenes out of context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligibility partly dissolved. He called these paintings his "Echoes".^[6] 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 paintings. 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.^[7]

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.

Sickert was married three times. His first wife Ellen was a daughter of Richard Cobden. His third wife was the painter Thérèse Lessore. ^[8]

[edit] Jack the Ripper theories

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.^[9]

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 Joseph Sickert, 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 rather than an accomplice. The opinions of Knight and Fuller are no longer widely accepted by other Ripper scholars.

In 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's penis was deformed from birth, which, she claims, made him incapable of sexual intercourse.

Cornwell purchased 31 of Sickert's paintings and is said to have destroyed one or more of them searching for Sickert's DNA,^{[citation needed]} a charge which she denies.^{[citation needed]} She DNA-tested numerous stamps and envelopes she believed to have been licked by Sickert, and compared them to stamps and envelopes from letters purported to have been written by Jack the Ripper. Most of these contained no nuclear DNA evidence at all, which is unsurprising considering their age and condition. 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 percent and .1 percent 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. Professor Ian Findlay has pointed out that the mitochondrial DNA recovered from the Openshaw letter "indicated a female profile" but "could have come from any of the many possible handlers of the letters over the years - perhaps even Patricia Cornwell".^[10] 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 Sickert wrote one or more of the letters claiming to be from the Ripper, that alone would not prove that he actually was the killer.

Cornwell's claim that Sickert had a deformed penis has also been disputed. The artist had three wives and many other lovers, reportedly resulting in several children (including Joseph Sickert, the man from whom Knight obtained his Royal Conspiracy theory). This would seem to invalidate the theory that Sickert could not perform sexually. Further, the doctor whom Sickert visited for his fistula problem did not normally treat genital disorders, 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 travelled 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.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000
• Camden Town Group

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Browse, Lillian (1960). "Sickert". London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
• Baron, Wendy; Shone, Richard, et al. (1992). Sickert Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05373-8
• Morphet, Richard, et al. (1981). Late Sickert: Paintings 1927 to 1942. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. ISBN 0-7287-0301-7
• Shone, Richard; Curtis, Penelope (1988). W R Sickert: Drawings and Paintings 1890-1942. Liverpool: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-85437-008-1
• Sitwell, Osbert, editor (1947). A Free House! or the artist as craftsman: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert (Macmillan & co., London).
• Sturgis, Matthew (2005). Walter Sickert: A Life. The latest biography of Sickert - in the final chapter Sturgis refutes the notion that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but also claims that if Sickert were still alive he would enjoy his current notoriety.

[edit] External links

• Biography of Walter Sickert
• "Cornwell v. Sickert: Portrait of the Artist as a Serial Killer" by Joseph Phelan, argues against Cornwell's theories and notes her failing to mention the influence of Degas on Sickert.
• Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer disputes Cornwell's claims.
• Casebook: Jack the Ripper - The Royal Conspiracy disputes Knight's theory.
• 'Bathers, Dieppe' (1902)