I don’t discount the possibility that this MO might have been the Ripper’s – at least in some of the murders. It really never occurred to me that it might be incorrect in any of them until I had a moment of enlightenment during the Christmas holiday of 2001 when I was in Aspen with my family. I was spending an evening alone in a condo at the base of Ajax Mountain, and as usual, I had several suitcases of research materials with me. I happened to be going through a Sickert art book for what must have been the twentieth time and stopped flipping pages when I got to his celebrated painting Ennui. What a strange thing, I thought, that this particular work of his was considered so extraordinary that Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother bought one of its five versions and hung it in Clarence House. Other versions are privately owned or hang in various prestigious museums, such as the Tate.
In all five versions of Ennui, a bored older man sits at a table, his cigar lit, a tall glass of what I assume to be beer in front of him. He stares off, deep in thought and completely uninterested in the woman behind him, leaning against a dresser, her head resting on her hand as she gazes unhappily at stuffed doves inside a glass dome. Central to the picture is a painting of a woman, a diva, on the wall behind the bored couple’s heads. Having seen several versions of Ennui, I was aware that the diva in each has a slightly different appearance.
In three of them, she has what appears to be a thick feather boa thrown around her naked shoulders. But in the late Queen Mother’s version and the one in the Tate there is no feather boa, just some indistinguishable reddish-brown shape that envelopes her left shoulder and extends across her upper arm and left breast. It wasn’t until I was feeling ennui myself as I sat in the Aspen condo that I noticed a vertical crescent, rather fleshy-white, above the diva’s left shoulder. The fleshy-white shape has what appears to be a slight bump on the left side that looks very much like an ear.
Upon closer inspection, the shape becomes a man’s face half in the shadows. He is coming up behind the woman. She is barely turning her face as if she senses his approach. Under the low magnification of a lens, the half-shadowed face of the man is more apparent, and the woman’s face begins to look like a skull. But at a higher magnification, the painting dissolves into the individual touches of Sickert’s brushes. I went to London and looked at the original painting at the Tate, and I did not change my mind. I sent a transparency of the painting to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine to see if we could get a sharper look through technology.
Computerized image enhancement detects hundreds of gray shades that the human eye can’t see and makes it possible for a fuzzy photograph or erased writing to become visible or discernible. While forensic image enhancement might work with bank videotapes or bad photographs, it does not work on paintings. All our efforts accomplished with Ennui was to separate Sickert’s brush strokes until we ended up with the reverse of what he was doing when he put the strokes together. I was reminded, as I would be repeatedly in the Ripper case, that forensic science does not and will not ever take the place of human detection, deduction, experience, and common sense – and very hard work.
Sickert’s Ennui was mentioned in the Ripper investigation long before I gave the matter a thought, but in a very different way from what I have just described. In one version of the painting, the feather-boa-enveloped diva has a white blob on her left shoulder that is slightly reminiscent of one of the stuffed doves under the glass dome on top of the dresser. Some Ripper enthusiasts insist that the “bird” is a “sea gull” and that Sickert cleverly introduced the “gull” into his painting to drop the clue that Jack the Ripper was Sir William Gull, who was Queen Victoria’s surgeon. The advocates of this interpretation usually subscribe to the so-called royal conspiracy that implicates Dr. Gull and the Duke of Clarence in five Ripper murders.