Sickert Was Ripper

[Phil H]

I don't know Ms Cornwell and can comment neither on her similarity to JtR nor whether her creativity is similar.

Actors play parts without being at all like the role they are playing (Shakespeare's Richard III say).

I think Sickert was somewhat creepier than that and did identify strongly with "Jack" - the references to his red handkerchief that seems to have been some sort of fetish object for him, seem to speak to that.

I also think Ms Cornwell may well have demonstrated a STRONG possibility that Sickert wrote some of the letters - also taking things rather further than many authors would do.

Phil H

[Limehouse]

Limehouse - I don't think I have questioned Sickert's sanity or his choice of genre.

Sickert had many interests including the music hal/theatre of whic he was awonderful recorder.

He was also a major mentor among future stalwarts of the british artistic world.

I don't think Sickert was any more possessed by the Ripper theme than anyone else at that time.

Then I would beg to differ, as recorded by my reading of Jean Overton Fuller, Florence Pash, Osbert Sitwell etc.

I merely said that I think Sickert had an obsession in his personal life, based on my reading of his work/biographies, and that he was a somewhat eccentric person. Subjective, but my humble opinion on the basis of many years reading.

Sorry Phil, I phrased my post badly. I didn't mean to suggest you questioned Sickert's sanity or his use of genre. I meant that the irony for me, via Cornwell's argument, is that she points to Sickert's subject matter as being evident of his state of mind and his possible guilt, and yet her own creativity deals with the same thing - murder and violence.

Certainly Sickert was eccentric, as are many creative people. Sickert, like many people of the time, was interested in the murders and some of that interest was communicated via a small portion of his work. As I wrote in my post - this work was a kind of narrative - in the same way a newspaper account of the murders was a kind of narrative (with many witness narrative flourishes and embelishments).

Of course, Osbert Sitwell was a friend of Sickert's and any stories that come via that route are bound to be more reliable and Miss Cornwell's assertions.

regards

Julie

[Phil H]

Limehouse - I don't think I have questioned Sickert's sanity or his choice of genre.

Sickert had many interests including the music hal/theatre of whic he was awonderful recorder.

He was also a major mentor among future stalwarts of the british artistic world.

I don't think Sickert was any more possessed by the Ripper theme than anyone else at that time.

Then I would beg to differ, as recorded by my reading of Jean Overton Fuller, Florence Pash, Osbert Sitwell etc.

I merely said that I think Sickert had an obsession in his personal life, based on my reading of his work/biographies, and that he was a somewhat eccentric person. Subjective, but my humble opinion on the basis of many years reading.

[Limehouse]

LOL Iain.

I think the difference between us and Sickert maybe that he dressed up as JtR (the red handkerchief/bandana); we don't paint pictures that allude to murders; and we don't write hoax letters to the police (as he appears to have done).

Unless of course you do.....

Phil H

The great irony for me Phil, is that Patricia Cornwell earned a fortune from writing narratives in which a woman spends her life cutting up people who have died or have been murdered. In her stories, murder and violence feature greatly and she has created these stories from her own mind.

Sickert, through the very few of his paintings that depict murder and particularly JtR, paints (instead of writes) narratives which relate to real events. I don't think Sickert was any more possessed by the Ripper theme than anyone else at that time. Certainly it features in his work - but as the medium of a painter - rather like a newspaper feature writer would have used the medioum of the newspaper.

Nobody would question Cornwell's sanity or point an accusing finger at her based on her choice of genre - so why should they so so to Sickert ?

regards

Julie

[Iain Wilson]

Oh come on; you're not seriously telling me that you've never dressed up as a Victorian serial killer, painted sone crazy, murder-themed water colours and written letters to the police taunting them for unsolved crimes that you didn't commit?

That's just a good Saturday night for me...



Should I expect a thread started soon from someone basing a suspect book on me? If so, my agent is ready for your calls...

[Phil H]

LOL Iain.

I think the difference between us and Sickert maybe that he dressed up as JtR (the red handkerchief/bandana); we don't paint pictures that allude to murders; and we don't write hoax letters to the police (as he appears to have done).

Unless of course you do.....

Phil H

[Iain Wilson]

Yeah, the murders (and murder in general) certainly seemed to hold a fascination for him. How much of this we can put down to an artistic temperament, and how much of it was unhealthy interest we'll never know, but as a group of individuals who spend some of our spare time logging onto a forum to discuss 124 year old murders I hardly think we're fit to comment!

Saying that, this interest in the case certainly doesn't - in itself - make any of us serial killers. Right? Stop looking at me like that...

[Phil H]

I agree with you iain, of course. But there does seem to have been a separate thread of suspicion about in Sickert via Florence Pash (?) andJean Overton Fuller - all second-hand/hearsay though.

My suspicion is that Sickert WAS known to be interested in murders and especially the Whitechapel murders. The actor in him made him identify with killers and perhaps obsess about the, he seems to have talked to people about the killings and evidently enjoyed paiting associated subjects 9though I do not think he was referring in any way to the 1888 murders).

Sickert was, I believe off (maybe eccentric was a better word) and probably had an impish/irreverent sense of humour.

All this might have been interpreted as making him (mistakenly) a possible Ripper in his own right. If Jo "Hobo" Gorman (Sickert) did have any family connection to Walter, then some trickle of this obsession might have reached him second-hand.

I repeat that none of this in any way makes Sickert the killer.

Phil H

[Iain Wilson]

But I do not see a SHRED of evidence as Walter Sickert as JtR. Writing letters is no indication that someone is a killer!

Hear, hear! Any theory that rests on "he may have written one or more of the letters" (along with side helpings of pop psychology) while turning a blind eye to huge, factual holes (the aforementioned "French built teleporter") isn't worthy of consideration.

Especially when you consider the story's early genesis with the likes of Joe Gorman...

[Phil H]

I have followed the Sickert theory from its incarnation in the BBC "Barlow and Watt" series in the 70s.

The whole thing is - to my way of thinking - very ill-founded, from Joseph Gorman's unreliable ideas (which he denied subsequently); through the proven fraudulence of knight's book; to the later Gorman ideas that he possessed the diaries of an Abberline who could not spell his own name!

Then there are the FACTUAL issues - his whereabouts (almost certainly in France) when the murders occured.

All the other ideas that relate to Sickert are second hand.

I have studied Sickert's paintings and can see no relation to him being "Jack", though he was definitely interested in the Whitechapel murders and may have associated himself with the killer in some way. I believe that Sickert was eccentric, even odd, and I think that Ms Cornwell has demonstrated that walter may have been behind some of the letters sent to the police.

The simplest way of interpreting the use of his stationery, is to assume that he - a known prankster - wwas the writer. I think this would have fitted in with his sense of humour and given him some "locus" (in his own mind) with the crimes.

But I do not see a SHRED of evidence as Walter Sickert as JtR. Writing letters is no indication that someone is a killer!

Phil

[Limehouse]

Sickert was in France. He used his mother's stationary to send letters during this time period of the murders.

BUT... other letters sent during this time period were written on his own stationary from his home.

Having a fistual does not make one a serial killer... but sending taunting letters to the press and the police claiming to be the killer, just might.

So what was his true objective in murdering these women then? If the fistual was not the cause of his murder spree, what was?

[BTCG]

Is there evidence that he sent taunting letters to the press and the police? If not, how does the fact that a man uses his own stationery to send letters from his home address mark him out as a serial killer?

Seriously, "Famous Artist Was Serial Killer" is not an avenue worth pursuing.

Regards, Bridewell.

Certainly, an enemy could have obtained the stationary in an attempt to frame Sickert.

But given the lack of forensic science during this time period, Occam's razor would seem to prevail.

Your question too, seems somewhat inverted. When someone claims credit, the burden shifts to prove otherwise.

[Bridewell]

Sending Letters

Sickert was in France. He used his mother's stationary to send letters during this time period of the murders.

BUT... other letters sent during this time period were written on his own stationary from his home.

Having a fistual does not make one a serial killer... but sending taunting letters to the press and the police claiming to be the killer, just might.

Is there evidence that he sent taunting letters to the press and the police? If not, how does the fact that a man uses his own stationery to send letters from his home address mark him out as a serial killer?

Seriously, "Famous Artist Was Serial Killer" is not an avenue worth pursuing.

Regards, Bridewell.

[BTCG]

But Lime and Maurice it had to be him because he called himself Nemo. Which of course back then was a popular way of signing your letters as anonymous.

Do you have a source for this?

[BTCG]

Unless Walter was in France at the time!

Having a fistula does not make one a serial killer either.

Sickert was in France. He used his mother's stationary to send letters during this time period of the murders.

BUT... other letters sent during this time period were written on his own stationary from his home.

Having a fistual does not make one a serial killer... but sending taunting letters to the press and the police claiming to be the killer, just might.