CHAPTER SIX
WALTER AND THE BOYS
By the age of five, Sickert had undergone three horrific surgeries for a fistula.
In every Sickert biography I have read, there is no more than a brief mention of these surgeries, and I am not aware that anyone has ever gone on record to say what this fistula was or why three life-threatening operations were required to repair it. Furthermore, there is to date no scholarly, objective book that sets forth in detail his eighty-one years on this earth.
While much is to be learned from Denys Sutton’s 1976 biography of Sickert because the author was a thorough researcher and relied on conversations with people who had known the “old master,” Sutton was somewhat compromised since he had to obtain permission from the Sickert Trust in order to use copyrighted materials such as letters. The legal restrictions on the reproduction of Sickert materials, including his art, are the foreboding mountains one must scale to view the entire panorama of the man’s intensely conflicted and complicated personality. In a research note in Sutton’s archives at the University of Glasgow, there appears to be a reference to a “Ripper” painting Sickert may have done in the 1930s. If there is such a painting, I have found no mention of it anywhere else.
There are other references to Sickert’s peculiar behavior that should have aroused at least a bit of curiosity in anyone who studied him carefully. In a letter from Paris, November 16, 1968, Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury group, wrote Sutton that he had known Walter Sickert around 1930 and had very clear memories of Sickert claiming to have “lived” in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him “spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin.”
Art historian and Sickert scholar Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins of the University of Reading says that she does not see how it is possible for one to study Sickert extensively and not begin to suspect that he was Jack the Ripper. Some of her published studies on his art have included observations that are a bit too insightful for the proper Sickert palate. It seems that truths about him are as cloaked in fog as the Ripper was, and bringing to light any detail that might portend anything ignoble about the man is blasphemous.
In early 2002, Howard Smith, the curator of the Manchester City Art Gallery, contacted me to ask if I was aware that in 1908 Walter Sickert painted a very dark, gloomy painting titled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. The work was donated in 1980, and the curator at the time notified Dr. Wendy Baron – who did her doctoral dissertation on Sickert and has written more on the artist than anyone else – to let her know of this remarkable find. “We have just received a bequest of two oil paintings by Sickert,” curator Julian Treuherz wrote to Dr. Baron on September 2, 1980. One of them, he said, was “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, oil on canvas, 20×16″.”
Dr. Baron replied to Mr. Treuherz on October 12th and verified that the bedroom in the painting was indeed the bedroom in a Camden Town residence (at 6 Mornington Crescent) where Sickert rented the top two floors when he moved back to London from France in 1906. Dr. Baron further observed that this Camden Town residence was where “Sickert believed Jack the Ripper had lodged” in the 1880s. Although I have not found any references to the Mornington Crescent address as the place where Sickert thought the Ripper once lived, Sickert could have had a secret room there during the 1888 serial murders. And in letters the Ripper wrote, he said he was moving into a lodging house, which could have been the one at 6 Mornington Crescent – where Sickert was living in 1907 when yet another prostitute’s throat was slashed barely a mile from his rooming house.
Sickert used to tell friends the story that he once had stayed in a house whose landlady claimed that Jack the Ripper had lived there during the crimes and that she knew his identity: The Ripper was a sickly veterinary student who was eventually whisked off to an asylum. She told Sickert the sickly serial killer’s name, which Sickert said he wrote down in a copy of Casanova’s memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, despite Sickert’s photographic memory, he could not recall the name, and his copy of the book was destroyed in World War II.