Walter Sickert knew about watermarks. He knew about paper. It is hard to imagine him writing Ripper letters and not being aware of the watermark. It is hard to imagine that Sickert wouldn’t have been aware of the type of paper he was using, including good paper such as Monckton’s Superfine and art paper. He may have used his A Pirie & Sons and Joynson Superfine personal stationery because he assumed that even if the police did notice the partial watermarks on the torn paper, they probably would not have linked a Ripper letter to the charming gentleman-artist Walter Sickert, who was not a suspect at the time. One does have to wonder, however, what might have happened had the police published the partial watermarks and printed them on posters.
Probably nothing. If Sickert’s friends – or Ellen – recognized a partial watermark, they weren’t likely to link Walter Sickert with Jack the Ripper. What surprises me most is that I cannot find any evidence that the police noticed the watermarks, and they should have. More than ten percent of the 211 Ripper letters at the Public Record Office (PRO) have watermarks or partial ones. Not all watermarked paper is expensive, but it also isn’t associated with the street-slang-talking paupers who police and the press believed were writing most of the Ripper letters.
Sickert was a magpie with paper. He did not waste it. If he was out of paper, he would paste together remnants of whatever he could find and send a note scrawled on a paper patchwork quilt. In several letters to Whistler, Sickert jotted, “No paper in the house,” especially if he was approaching the Master about needing money.
“Excuse paper cannot afford to Buy any dear Boss,” the Ripper wrote on November 15, 1888.
Sickert made sketches on a variety of papers, from coarse brown toilet paper to vellum. Paying attention to types of paper and watermarks in criminal and civil investigations certainly was not new technology in 1888. Why no policeman or detective observed what many of the Jack the Ripper letters were written on or with is baffling and inexcusable. Someone should have noticed that the “ink” was actually paint, and “pens” were really paintbrushes or drawing pens with large nibs. Microscopy, infrared spectrophotometry, pyrolysis-gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence, and neutron activation analysis were not required to figure out that much.
One explanation for these oversights is that until now police and others dismissed the letters as hoaxes. Photocopies and photographs aren’t the best means of seeing the delicate feathering of brushes, or the beautiful purple, blue, red, burgundy, orange, sienna, and sepia colors used to write words and make splashes and strokes on these letters from so-called illiterates and lunatics. It takes an art expert’s eye to detect that smears thought to be blood are really etching ground, and if Dr. Ferrara had not used an Omnichrome alternate light source and a variety of different filters, we would not have been able to coax eradicated writing out from under its cover of heavy black ink.
In one letter, the Ripper gives the police fill-in-the-blanks for his “name” and “address,” but as a “Ha Ha” he blots out the “information” with dark black rectangles and coffin shapes. Under the black ink the Omnichrome revealed ha and the barely legible and partial signature Ripper, This sort of diabolical teasing is typical of someone who believes that anything “hidden” will puzzle the hell out of the police. Another bit of Ripper fun was to take an envelope and glue a strip of paper on the front of it, implying that the envelope was recycled and the original recipient’s name is under the strip.
Dr. Ferrara performed long, delicate surgery to lift that strip. There was nothing under it. But the Ripper’s mean-spirited, mocking teases failed to bring him the satisfaction he craved. There is no sign, for example, that anyone cared what was under that strip before Dr. Ferrara removed it 114 years after the Ripper sent the “joke” in the mail. There is no hint that the police tried to figure out what was hidden under the shapes in heavy black ink.
It is easy to forget that in 1888 Walter Sickert wasn’t on investigators’ minds and that Scotland Yard did not have access to the likes of Peter and Sally Bower, art historian and Sickert expert Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins, paper conservator Anne Kennett, and curator of the Sickert archives Vada Hart. It has required intellectual sleuths such as these to discover that many of the Ripper letters contain telltale signs of Sickert’s handwriting, and that in some cases, a single letter was written and drawn in several colors or mediums and with at least two different writing instruments, including colored pencils, lithographic crayons, and paintbrushes.