Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

Many of the nudes and other female subjects have bare necks with black lines around them, as if to suggest a cut throat or decapitation. Some dark areas around a figure’s throat are intended to be shadows and shading, but the dark, solid, black lines I refer to are puzzling. They are not jewelry, so if Sickert drew and painted what he saw, what are these lines? The mystery grows with a picture titled Patrol, dated 1921 – a painting of a policewoman with bulging eyes and an open-neck tunic that reveals a solid, black line around her throat.

What is known about Patrol is vague. Sickert most likely painted it from a photograph of a policewoman, possibly Dorothy Peto of the Birmingham police. Apparently, she acquired the painting and moved to London, where she signed on with the Metropolitan Police, to which she eventually donated the life-size Sickert portrait of herself. The intimation of at least one Metropolitan Police archivist is that the painting may be Taluable, but it is disliked, especially by women. When I saw Patrol, it was hanging behind a locked door and chained to a wall. No one seems quite sure what to do with it. I suppose it’s another Ripper “ha ha” – al­beit an accidental one – that Scotland Yard owns a painting by the most notorious murderer the Yard never caught.

Patrol isn’t exactly a tribute to women or policing, nor would it ap­pear that Sickert intended it to be anything other than another one of his subtle, scary fantasies. The frightened expression on the policewoman’s face belies the power of her profession, and in typical Sickert fashion, the painting has the patina of morbidity and of something very bad about to happen. The wooden-framed 741A-by-461/4-inch canvas Patrol is a dark mirror in the bright galleries of the art world, and references to it and reproductions of it are not easily found.

Certain of his paintings do seem as secret as Sickert’s many hidden rooms, but the decision to keep them under cover may not have been made solely by their owners. Sickert himself had a great deal to say about which of his works were to be exhibited. Even if he gave a painting to a friend – as is the case with Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom – he could have asked the person to lend it to various exhibitions, or keep it private. Some of his work was probably part of his catch-me-if-you-can fun. He was brazen enough to paint or draw Ripperish scenes, but not always reckless enough to exhibit them. And these unseemly works continue to surface, now that the search is on.

Most recently, an uncatalogued Sickert sketch was discovered that seems to be a flashback to his music-hall days in 1888. Sickert made the sketch in 1920, and it depicts a bearded male figure talking to a prostitute. The man’s back is partially to us, but we get the impression that his penis is exposed and that he is holding a knife in his right hand. At the bottom of the sketch is what appears to be a disemboweled woman whose arms have been dismembered – as if Sickert is showing the before and after of one of his kills. Art historian Dr. Robins believes the sketch went unnoticed because, in the past, the notion of looking for this sort of violence in Sickert’s works was not foremost on the minds of people such as herself, and archival curators, and Sickert experts.

But when one works hard and begins to know what to look for, the unusual turns up, including news stories. Most people interested in news accounts of Jack the Ripper’s murders rely on facsimiles from public records or microfilm. When I began this investigation, I chose The Times as the newspaper of record and was fortunate to find copies of the orig­inals for 1888-91. In that era, newsprint had such a high cotton fiber content that The Times papers I own could be ironed, sewn together, and bound, good as new.

I have continued to be surprised by the number of news publications that have survived for over a hundred years and are still supple enough for one to turn their pages without fear. Having begun my career as a journalist, I know full well that there are many stories to a story and that without looking at as many bits and pieces of reportage as I can find I can’t begin to approach the whole truth. Ripper journalism in the major papers of the day is not scarce, but what is often overlooked are the quiet witnesses of lesser-known publications, such as the Sunday Dispatch.