“It was an unfortunate conflation of events of Sickert’s own murder painting, and then the story told to him by his landlady in Mornington Crescent that the Ripper had lodged there 20 years ago.” In fact, the artist was in France when the Ripper struck in 1888. Matthew Sturgis, who wrote an acclaimed biography of the artist in 2005, also regards the Ripper slur as “nonsense”. “He was very interested in Jack the Ripper, but so was everyone else.” “Sickert was almost playing up to it,” said Kennedy. And, as Kennedy points out, the Camden murder took place just around the corner from Sickert’s north London home, while his interest in Jack the Ripper was one shared by most Victorians. But this theory has been widely discredited. Infamously, Sickert’s four paintings of the Camden Town murder of 1907 led the American novelist Patricia Cornwell to argue he was actually Jack the Ripper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |