Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Ellen gave him a sense of identity. The marriage gave him a safe base in the endless game of tag he played. He always had her to run back to, and she always gave him what she could – and would continue to do so, even if it was secretly purchasing his paintings through Blanche. Sickert the showman didn’t do well without an audience or a supporting cast. He was alone backstage in a dark, cold place, and he didn’t like it. He did not miss Ellen the way she missed him, and the ultimate tragedy of Sickert is that he was damned to a life that would not allow physical or emotional intimacy. “At least you feel!” he once wrote Blanche.

Sickert’s genetic aberrations and childhood traumas had found his fis­sures and chiseled him to pieces. One piece of him would give painting lessons to Winston Churchill, while another piece wrote a letter to the press in 1937 praising Adolf Hitler’s art. One piece of Sickert was kind to his drug-addicted, weak brother Bernhard, while another piece thought nothing of appearing at the Red Cross hospital to sketch soldiers suffering and dying, and then ask for their uniforms since they wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

One piece of Sickert could praise a fledgling artist and be very gener­ous with his time and instruction, while another piece trashed Masters such as Cezanne and Van Gogh and wrote a lie in the Saturday Review with the intention of defaming the careers of Joseph Pennell and Whistler. One piece of Sickert fooled friends into thinking he was a lady’s man, while another piece of him called women “bitches” – or in Ripper letters, “cunts” – and wrote them off as a lower order of life, and murdered and mutilated them and further degraded and violated them in his art. The

complexities of Sickert may very well be endless, but one fact about him is clearly etched: He did not marry for love.

But in 1911, he decided it was time to marry again. It was a decision he may have premeditated less than his crimes. His courtship was a blitz on one of his young art students described by Robert Emmons, Sickert’s first biographer, as lovely and having a “swan neck.” She apparently suffered great misgivings and jilted Sickert at the altar, deciding to marry someone better suited to her station in life.

“Marriage off. Too sore to come,” Sickert telegraphed Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson on July 3, 1911.

Immediately, he turned his attention to another one of his art stu­dents, Christine Drummond Angus, the daughter of John Angus, a Scot­tish leather merchant who was sure Sickert was after his money. Money was a very good commodity but not the only need in Sickert’s life. He had no one to take care of him. Christine was eighteen years younger than Sickert, and a pretty woman with a childlike figure. She was sickly and rather lame, having spent much of her life suffering from neuritis and chilblains – or inflammation of the nerves and painful, itchy swelling. She was intelligent and capable of museum-quality embroidery, and a very competent artist, but she did not know Walter Sickert personally.

They had never socialized outside the classroom when he decided to marry her. He overwhelmed her with telegrams and letters many times a day until the unexpected and excessive attention from her art instruc­tor made her very ill and her family sent her away to rest in Chagford, Devon. Sickert was not invited to join her but got on the train and rode the entire way. Within days, they were engaged, much against her father’s wishes.

Mr. Angus conceded to the engagement when he learned that the penniless artist had suddenly sold a large portrait to an anonymous buyer. Maybe Christine wasn’t making such a bad decision after all. Sickert’s anonymous buyer was Florence Pash, a patron and friend of Sickert’s who wanted to help him out. “Marrying Saturday a certain Christine Angus,” Sickert telegraphed Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands on July 26,1911. But, he added his bad news, the jeweler “would not take the wedding ring back” that Sickert had bought for the first art stu­dent he had pursued.

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