CHAPTER ELEVEN
SUMMER NIGHT
Mary Ann Nichols’s eyes were wide open when her body was discovered on the pavement. She stared blindly into the dark, her face a wan yellow in the weak flame of a bull’s-eye lantern.
In Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, wide staring eyes are the accompaniment to “horror,” which Darwin associates with “extreme terror” or the “horrible pain of torture.” It is a centuries-old fallacy that a person dies with the last emotion frozen on his or her face. But symbolically, Mary Ann’s expression seemed to capture the last thing she saw in her life – the dark silhouette of her murderer cutting her up. The fact that the police made note in their reports of her wide, staring eyes may reflect what the men in blue on the street were beginning to feel about the Whitechapel murderer: He was a monster, a phantom who, in Inspector Abberline’s words, did not leave “the slightest clue.”
The image of a woman with her throat slashed and her wide eyes staring up blindly from the pavement would not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. Sickert would not have forgotten it. More than anyone else, he would have remembered her stare as life fled from her. In 1903, if his dates are reliable, he drew a sketch of a woman whose eyes are wide open and staring. She looks dead and has an inexplicable dark line around her throat. The sketch is rather innocuously titled Two Studies of a Venetian Woman’s Head. Three years later he followed it with a painting of a nude grotesquely sprawled on an iron bedstead and titled that picture Nuit d’Ete, or Summer Night. One recalls that Mary Ann Nichols was murdered on a summer night. The woman in the sketch and the woman in the painting look alike. Their faces resemble the face of Mary Ann Nichols, based on a photograph taken of her when she was inside her shell at the mortuary and had already been “cleaned up” by workhouse inmates Mann and Hatfield.
Mortuary photographs were made with a big wooden box camera that could shoot only directly ahead. Bodies the police needed to photograph had to be stood up or propped upright against the dead-house wall because the camera could not be pointed down or at an angle. Sometimes the nude dead body was hung on the wall with a hook, nail, or peg at the nape of the neck. A close inspection of the photograph of a later victim, Catherine Eddows, shows her nude body suspended, one foot barely touching the floor.
These grim, degrading photographs were for purposes of identification and were not made public. The only way a person could know what Mary Ann Nichols’s dead body looked like was to have viewed it at the mortuary or at the scene. If Sickert’s sketch of the so-called Venetian woman is indeed a Representation of Mary Ann Nichols’s staring dead face, then he might well have been at the scene or somehow got hold of the police reports – unless the detail was in a news story I somehow missed. Even if Sickert had seen Mary Ann at the mortuary, her eyes would have been shut by then, just as they are in her photograph. By the time she was photographed and viewed by those who might identify her and by the inquest jurors, her wounds had been sutured, and her body had been covered to the chin to hide the gaping cuts to the throat.
Unfortunately, few morgue photographs of the Ripper’s victims exist, and the ones preserved at the Public\ Record Office are small and have poor resolution, which worsens with enlargement. Forensic image enhancement helps a little, but not much. Other cases that were not linked to the Ripper at the time – or ever – may not have been photographed at all. If they were, those photographs seem to have vanished. Crime-scene photographs usually weren’t taken unless the victim’s body was indoors. Even then the case had to be unusual for the police to fetch their heavy box camera.
In today’s forensic cases, bodies are photographed multiple times and from many angles with a variety of photographic equipment, but during the Ripper’s violent spree, it was rare to call for a camera. It would have been even rarer for a mortuary or a dead house to be equipped with one. Technology had not advanced enough for photographs to be taken at night. These limitations mean that there is only a scant visual record of Jack the Ripper’s crimes, unless one browses through a Walter Sickert art book or takes a look at his “murder” pictures and nudes that hang in fine museums and private collections. Artistic and scholarly analysis aside, most of Sickert’s sprawling nudes look mutilated and dead.