Was the painter Walter Sickert Jack the Ripper?

About the exhibition "Walter Sickert. Peindre et transgresser", which is being held at the Petit Palais, Paris, until 29 January 2023.

Let's face it: it's a rare occasion to be able to create a buzz about a painting exhibition because the artist in question is suspected of having been a serial killer! Especially since we still don't really know him in France, this disturbing Walter Sickert, born on 31 May 1860 in Munich, then kingdom of Bavaria, and died on 22 January 1942 in Bath, England. He was never bothered by Scotland Yard during his lifetime... even though a large number of clues suggest that he could be neither more nor less than the famous Jack the Ripper! It is impossible to ignore it today, since the exhibition "Walter Sickert. Peindre et transgresser" (Walter Sickert: Painting and Transgression) opened on 14 October at the Petit Palais in Paris, where it can be seen until 29 January. The magazine L'Oeil has a front page headline this month: "Walter Sickert, the painter who is accused of being Jack the Ripper".

This is the first time that a major retrospective is devoted in France to this elusive English painter, in every sense of the word. Organised in partnership with the Tate Britain, the exhibition was curated by Delphine Levy, who was the first director of Paris Musées and the internationally recognised French specialist on Walter Sickert, before she died suddenly in 2020, at the age of 51, following a stroke. "Walter Sickert is an artist who is not easily grasped," she wrote. "His painting is a reflection of his personality, both provocative and enigmatic. The painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, after forty years of friendship, evoked "a disdainful discretion, a sort of self-defence in his attitude towards human contact - noli me tangere... All relations with Sickert have an extraordinary, mysterious character".

Clara Roca, curator of the 19th and 20th century graphic arts and photography collections at the Petit Palais, is of course paying tribute to Delphine Levy today. She is the curator of this major exhibition, which shines a spotlight on the work of a resolutely modern artist with enigmatic subjects who provoked the Anglo-Saxon society of his time while forging artistic and friendly links with many French artists, but who is nonetheless very little represented in French art collections.

"In the Anglo-Saxon world, this rumour is very well known to the public," Clara Roca assures Marie Zawisza, the journalist from L'Oeil, who is astonished by Walter Sickert's painting of the room in his own home, entitled Jack the Ripper's Room, or by the series of paintings inspired by the murder of Emily Dimmock in 1907 in the London district of Camden Town. "How bizarre," writes the journalist. "Walter Sickert's paintings may well be evidence of the unsolved crimes of Jack the Ripper, and he himself may be convicted of the bloody murders of prostitutes in London in 1888.

He was actually charged with Jack the Ripper crimes post mortem in the 1970s, and was formally accused of them in 2002 by the famous crime writer Patricia Cornwell, with DNA evidence. Except that between August and October of that year 1888, Walter Sickert was in Dieppe... with Edgar Degas. "In 2021, an exhibition on this subject was even presented by the Walter Art Gallery in Liverpool," adds the journalist. "In France, however, the painter was gradually forgotten after the First World War. So much so that he invited himself to the Petit Palais in hushed tones, avoiding scandal, like a true gentleman.

It is nonetheless very difficult not to think, when faced with works of art as diverse and varied as their author, himself a former theatre actor and master of the art of cross-dressing, that they may have been painted by a woman murderer. Unless they were painted by a man who was passionate about hoaxes and unsolved crimes, guided solely by his taste for provocation and his intimate neuroses. Since there is still room for doubt, it is perhaps best to take a closer look. And this chronological journey is disturbing.

Well known in the United Kingdom, even if his works of art for sale remained mostly in his studio because of the scandalous scent emanating from his music hall scenes, considered as a place of debauchery by Victorian society, or his not at all "so British" nudes, it is important to know that Walter Sickert had a decisive impact on English figurative painting, notably on Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. His choices of colours, as virtuoso as they were strange, inherited from his apprenticeship with the American painter and engraver James Whistler (1834-1903), who was living in London at the time, as well as his disconcerting framing and the "de-erotisation" of his nudes presented in a prosaic manner in poor Camden Town interiors, struck his contemporaries.

His meeting with Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in Paris in 1883, and the unbreakable friendship that followed, did not just provide him with an alibi for Jack the Ripper's crimes. "Alongside Degas, the painter freed himself from the influence of Whistler and changed his style," notes Marie Zawisza in her article for L'Oeil. He imported to England a way of painting influenced by his stays in Paris and Dieppe. Thus the arts of the spectacle, a subject already familiar to the Parisian public who knew Toulouse-Lautrec, arrived in his work. Walter Sickert liked nothing better than to change his environment, just as he changed his costume or hairstyle. Having first married a rich heiress, the daughter of an important liberal politician, he does not hesitate to frequent the most subversive places he can find, nor to live in concubinage with the dean of the Dieppe fish market. This does not prevent him from painting "landscapes whose delicate play of light evokes the canvases of a Monet", the journalist points out.

In section 7 of the Petit Palais exhibition, the paintings belonging to the series he called his conversation pieces are presented. These famous "scenes of intimate life" in which Sickert excelled in depicting the boredom of a couple... which could lead to murder. This is a far cry from the paintings of the 18th century where, in the purest English tradition, painters showed marital or family happiness! Virginia Woolf, the writer who was a great lover of Sickert's paintings, said of Ennui, one of his most famous paintings: "The horror of the situation lies in the fact that there is no crisis; dreary minutes pass, old matches pile up with dirty glasses and cigar butts. Here again, the eccentric and mysterious English painter was breaking new ground by hijacking a calm and codified genre. By provoking. By transgressing.

As in the last years of his life, when he ingeniously transposed photographs found in the press into paintings, by developing what he called "the best way in the world to make a painting", notably using a projection lantern. Although he was now fully recognised as an artist, Walter Sickert was once again subjected to violent criticism when he presented his paintings made using this transposition process, which was eventually trivialised by artists of later generations, such as Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. To the very end, Sickert transgressed, even to the point of assuming the pose of Christ. It's only a short step from there to having done everything to pose as Jack the Ripper...