Walter Sickert

Walter Richard Sickert (May 31, 1860 in Munich (Germany) – January 22, 1942) was an English impressionist painter. Walter Sickert, painter, suspected by some of being Jack the Ripper. ... Walter Sickert, painter, suspected by some of being Jack the Ripper. ... Jump to: navigation, search May 31 is the 151st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (152nd in leap years), with 214 days remaining, as the last day of May. ... 1860 is the leap year starting on Sunday. ... Jump to: navigation, search January 22 is the 22nd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the year. ... Jump to: navigation, search Royal motto (French): Dieu et mon droit (Translated: God and my right) Englands location within the UK Official language English de facto Capital London de facto Largest city London Area - Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population - Total (mid-2004) - Density Ranked 1st UK... Jump to: navigation, search Impressionism was a 19th century art movement, that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists who began publicly exhibiting their art in the 1860s. ... A painter is a person who paints woodwork, walls, etc. ...

His father Oswald was Danish-German and his mother Eleanor was Anglo-Irish; Sickert was a cosmopolitan who favored ordinary people and urban scenes as his subject. He was the son and grandson of painters, but 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 studied with Edgar Degas. Jump to: navigation, search Henry Irving, as Hamlet, in a 1893 illustration from The Idler magazine John Henry Brodribb Irving (February 6, 1838–October 13, 1905),(whose original name was John Brodribb), became better known as Sir Henry Irving. ... Self portrait James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 14, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American painter and etcher. ... Edgar Degas (July 19, 1834 – September 27, 1917) was a French painter and sculptor. ...

The Old Bedford Music Hall c1885

He became an impressionist painter, but one with strong intimations of modernism. Many of Sickert's early 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, perfomer and orchestra is often confused, as figures gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. Isolated rhetorical gestures seem to be reaching out to no-one in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and peering out to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme of confused or failed communication between people was to become a regular feature of his art. Sickert also commonly emphasised the patterns of wallpaper and carvings in these buildings, creating abstract decorative arabesques, flattening the three-dimensional space. Many of these pictures connect the artificiality of art itself to the conventions of theatrical performance and painted backdrops. Such music hall and theatrical scenes are strongly influenced by Degas. 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. Jump to: navigation, search Image File history File links Download high resolution version (763x1000, 98 KB) Summary Walter Sickert, painting of the Old Bedford Music Hall 1880s. ... Jump to: navigation, search Image File history File links Download high resolution version (763x1000, 98 KB) Summary Walter Sickert, painting of the Old Bedford Music Hall 1880s. ... Jump to: navigation, search It has been suggested that Modernist project be merged into this article or section. ... Music Hall is a form of British theatrical entertainment which reached its peak of popularity between 1850 and 1960. ... The New English Art Club was founded in London in 1885 as an alternate venue to the Royal Academy. ... Dieppe is the name of several places and events: Dieppe, France (pop. ...

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 set up, 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. Sickert regularly portrayed figures placed ambiguously on the borderland between respectability and poverty. Jump to: navigation, search World War I was primarily a European conflict with many facets: immense human sacrifice, stalemate trench warfare, and the use of new, devastating weapons - tanks, aircraft, machineguns, and poison gas. ... Jacob Epstein photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1934 Sir Jacob Epstein (10 November 1880 - 19 August 1959) was an American-born sculptor who worked chiefly in England, where he pioneered modern sculpture, often producing controversial works that challenged taboos concerning what public artworks appropriately depict. ... Augustus John (January 4, 1878_October 13, 1961) was a Welsh painter. ... Wyndam Lewis in 1916 Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1882 - March 7, 1957) was a British painter and author. ... The Camden Town Group was a group of English Post-Impressionist artists. ... London is the capital city of the United Kingdom and of England. ... Jump to: navigation, search 1905 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Jump to: navigation, search 1911 was a common year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar). ... A Hundred Years of Independence by Henri Rousseau Post-impressionism is a term applied to painting styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — after impressionism. ... Jump to: navigation, search On White II by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923. ...

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. Sometimes he exhibited it 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 imitated by Lucien Freud. 1907 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... Jump to: navigation, search A Problem Picture is a genre of art popular in the late Victorian era, characterised by a deliberately ambiguous narrative that can be interpreted in several different ways. ... Lucian Freud OM (born December 8, 1922) is a British painter and printmaker. ...

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 eachother. In his later work Sickert adapted illustrations by John Gilbert, taking the scenes out of their context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligability partly dissolved. Sickert also used news photographs as sources in the same way in his late works of the 1930s. Sir John Gilbert (1817-1897) was a British artist. ...

He is considered an eccentric but influential figure of the transition from impressionism to modernism, and as an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th centuty.

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. Sir William Maxwell Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (May 25, 1879 - June 9, 1964) was a Canadian–British business tycoon and politician. ... Jump to: navigation, search The Beaverbrook Art Gallery is a small prestigious art gallery located in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada on the west bank of the Saint John River at the edge of the citys central business district. ... For the Canadian federal electoral district of the same name, see Fredericton (electoral district) Coat of arms of Fredericton Fredericton, population 47,560 (greater Fredericton 81,346, both per 2001 census), although unofficial reports more around 50,750 (greater Fredericton 84,523), is the capital of the province of New...

Sickert's sister was Helena Swanwick, a feminist and pacifist active in the women's suffrage movement. Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939) was a British feminist and pacifist. ... Jump to: navigation, search The movement for womens suffrage, led by suffragists (commonly called suffragettes), was a social, economic and political reform movement aimed at extending the suffrage (the right to vote) to women, advocating equal suffrage (abolition of graded votes) rather than universal suffrage (abolition of all discrimination...

The Ripper theory

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 murderer, 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. [1] Jack the Ripper is the pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area of London, England in the second half of 1888. ... Occupying three buildings, including what was originally the Royal Manchester Institution designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1824, the Manchester Art Gallery houses the civic art collection of Manchester, England. ...

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 a man 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 instead of just an accomplice. The opinions of Knight and Fuller are no longer widely accepted by other Ripper scholars. Stephen Knight (September 26, 1951 at Hainault, Essex - 25 July 1985) was a British author. ... It has been suggested that Royalty and urban legends#Rumour: Prince Albert Victor was Jack the Ripper be merged into this article or section. ...

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 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 had a penis that was deformed from birth, which she claims would make him incapable of sexual intercourse. Jump to: navigation, search 2002(MMII) is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A crime writer (not a crime author) is an author of crime fiction. ... Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Daniels on June 9, 1956) is the author of a popular series of crime novels featuring the fictional heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. ... Jump to: navigation, search Space-filling model of a section of DNA molecule Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions specifying the biological development of all cellular forms of life (and many viruses). ... Jump to: navigation, search The penis (plural penises) or phallus (plural phalli) is the external male copulatory organ of some animals, and, in mammals, the external male organ of urination. ... Jump to: navigation, search The missionary position is the most common position for sexual intercourse in humans The cowgirl sex position is a good position for kissing, caressing, and embracing of the paramour The Doggy position is thus named because canines as well as most other mammals use this position. ...

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 DNA-tested numerous stamps and envelopes she believed to have been licked by Sickert, and compared them to stamps and envelopes from letters claiming to be written by Jack the Ripper. Most of these contained no nuclear DNA evidence at all, which is unsurprising considering how old they are and how they have been treated over the years. 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% and .1% 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. 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 Cornwell can eventually prove that Sickert wrote one or more of the letters claiming to be from the Ripper, that would not be proof that he actually was the killer.

Cornwell's claim that Sickert had a deformed penis has also been disputed. The artist was known to have several wives and lovers, reportedly resulting in several children (including Joseph Sickert, the man Knight got his Royal Conspiracy theory from). This would seem to make the theory that Sickert could not perform sexually unlikely. Further, the doctor that Sickert visited for his fistula problem did not normally treat penises, 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 disfigured penis. In medicine, a fistula (pl. ... Proctology is the medical field on the diseases of the rectum, anus and pelvic floor. ...

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 traveled 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.

Reference

A Free House! or the artist as craftsman: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, Edited by Osbert Sitwell Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, fifth baronet, was an English writer. ...

External links

• Biography of Walter Sickert
• Artistic Legacy of 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 debunks Knight's theory.
• Patricia Cornwell's web site
• 'Bathers, Dieppe' (1902)