Horse racing, gambling in casinos, and boxing were interests of Sickert’s, although very little has been written about them in the books and articles I have seen. When the Ripper uses the term “Give up the sponge” in a letter that art experts believe Sickert wrote, is this a peek into Sickert’s personality or simply his thoughtless use of a cliche? Is there any meaning to be found in the murky self-portrait that Sickert painted in 1908 that features him in a studio standing behind what is supposed to be a plaster torso of a boxer but looks more like a female who is decapitated, her limbs raggedly severed? Is there any significance in the reference in another Ripper letter to “Bangor Street,” an address that doesn’t exist in London, but Bangor is the home of a racecourse in Wales?
While I have no evidence that Sickert bet on horse races, I don’t have any fact to say he didn’t. Gambling may have been a secret addiction. Certainly that would help explain how he managed to go through money so quickly. By the time he and the parsimonious Ellen divorced, she was financially crippled and would never recover. Sickert’s organized brain seemed to fail him when it came to finances. He thought nothing of hiring a cab and leaving it sitting all day. He gave away armfuls of paintings – sometimes to strangers – or let the canvases rot in his studios. He never earned much, but he had access to Ellen’s money – even after their divorce – and then to the money of other women who took care of him, including his next two wives.
Sickert was generous to his brother Bernhard, who was a failed artist. He rented numerous rooms at a time, bought painting supplies, read multiple newspapers daily, must have had quite a wardrobe for his many disguises, was a devotee of the theaters and music halls, and traveled. But most of what he bought and rented was shabby and cheap, and he wasn’t likely to go for the best seats in the house or travel first class. I don’t know how much he gave away, but after their divorce, Ellen wrote, “To give him money is like giving it to a child to light a fire with.”
She believed him to be so financially irresponsible – for reasons she never cited – that after their divorce she conspired with Jacques-Emile Blanche to buy Sickert’s paintings. Blanche began purchasing them and she secretly reimbursed him. Sickert “must never never suspect that it comes from me,” Ellen wrote Blanche. “I shall tell no one” – not even her sister Janie, in whom she had always confided. Ellen knew what Janie thought of Sickert and his exploitative ways. She also knew that helping her former husband was not really helping him. No matter what he got, it would never be enough. But she could not seem to help herself when it came to helping him.
“He is never out of my mind day or night,” Ellen wrote Blanche in 1899. “You know what he is like – a child where money is concerned. Will you again be as kind as you were before & buy one of Walter’s pictures at the right moment to be of most use to him? And will you not forget that this will be of no good unless you insist on arranging how the money is to be spent. He borrowed £600 from his brother in law (who is a poor man) & he ought to pay him interest on the sum. But I cannot.”
Addiction to drugs and alcohol ran in Sickert’s family. He probably had an addictive predisposition, which would help explain why he avoided alcohol in his younger years and then abused it later on. It would be risky to say that Sickert had a gambling problem. But money seemed to vanish when he touched it, and while the mention of horse racing and the cities where courses were located in the Ripper letters does not constitute “proof,” these details pique our curiosity.
Sickert could have done pretty much whatever he pleased. His career did not require him to keep regular hours. He did not have to account to anyone, especially now that his apprenticeship with Whistler had ended and Sickert was no longer bound to do as the Master demanded. In the fall of 1888, the Master was on his honeymoon and neither knew nor cared what Sickert did with his days. Ellen and Janie were in Ireland – not that Ellen had to be away when Sickert decided to vanish for a night or a week. Disappearing in Great Britain was relatively easy, as long as the trains were running. It was no great matter to cross the English Channel in the morning and have dinner in France that evening.