Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

In a July 20,1902, letter from Jacques-Emile Blanche to novelist Andre Gide, Blanche says that Sickert’s “life more and more defies everyone…. This immoralist has ended up living alone in a large house in a working class suburb so that he doesn’t have to do anything regarded as normal and can do what ever he likes whenever he likes. He does this without a sou having a legitimate family in England and a fishwife in Dieppe, with a swarm of children of provenances which are not possible to count.”

The medical implications of Sickert’s early surgeries would suggest he was unable to father children, but without medical records all one can do is to speculate. He would not have wanted to bother with children, even if he could have fathered them, and Ellen probably wouldn’t have wanted them, either. She was almost thirty-seven and he was twenty-five when, after a four-year engagement, they married at the Marylebone Registry Office on June 10, 1885. He was starting his career and did not want children, says his nephew John Lessore, and Ellen was getting a bit old to have them.

She may also have been an advocate of the Purity League, which en­couraged women not to engage in intercourse. Sex was what held women back and victimized them. Ellen and Janie were both ardent feminists, and Janie had no children, either, for reasons not clear. Both women were in agreement with the Malthusians, who used Thomas Malthus’s essay on population as the basis for promoting contraception – even if the Reverend Malthus himself was actually opposed to contraception.

Ellen’s diaries and correspondence reveal an intelligent, socially so­phisticated, decent woman who was idealistic about love. She was also very careful. Or someone was. Over the thirty-four years she knew and loved Walter Sickert, she mentions him very few times. Janie mentions him more often, but not with the frequency one might expect from a thoughtful woman who should have cared about her sister’s spouse. Gaps in the some four hundred existing letters and notes the sisters wrote to each other suggest that much of their correspondence has vanished. I found only thirty-some letters from 1880 to 1889, which is puzzling. During this decade Ellen got engaged to Sickert and they were married.

I found not a single allusion to Ellen’s wedding, and based on the list of witnesses on the marriage certificate, no one in her family or Sickert’s was present at the Registry Office, a very odd place for a first marriage in those days, especially when the bride was the daughter of Richard Cobden. There does not appear to be a single letter from Ellen when she was on her honeymoon in Europe, and in no archival source did I dis­cover correspondence between Ellen and Sickert or between Ellen and Sickert’s family or between Sickert and his family or between Sickert and the Cobden family.

If such letters existed, possibly they were destroyed or have been kept out of public circulation. I find it strange that a husband and wife ap­parently did not write or telegraph each other when they were apart, which was more often than not. I find it significant that the legacy-minded Ellen apparently did not preserve letters from Sickert when she believed in his genius and that he was destined to become an important artist.

“I know how good it is,” Ellen writes of Sickert’s art. “I have always known,” she wrote Blanche.

By 1881, the young, beautiful, blue-eyed Walter had attached himself to a woman whose yearly stipend was as much as 250 pounds – more than what some young physicians earned then. There was no reason why Sickert shouldn’t enroll in the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. The 1881 Slade syllabus indicates courses strong in the sci­ences: antique and life classes, etching, sculpture, archaeology, perspec­tive, chemistry of materials used in painting, and anatomy. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there were lectures that focused on “the bones, joints and muscles.”

During Sickert’s time at the Slade he became friendly with Whistler, but how they actually met is hazy. One story is that Sickert and Whistler were in the audience at the Lyceum while Ellen Terry was performing. During the curtain call, Sickert hurled roses weighted with lead onto the stage and the fragrant missile almost hit Henry Irving, who was not amused. Whistler’s infamous “ha ha!” could be heard in the crowd. As the audience was filing out, Whistler made a point of meeting the auda­cious young man.