Sickert’s private working life “took him to queer places where he improvised studios and workshops,” art dealer Lillian Browse wrote a year after his death. As early as 1888, when he was frequenting the music halls, he obsessively rented secret rooms he could not afford. “I am taking new rooms,” he would tell his friends. In 1911 he writes, “I have taken on a tiny, odd, sinister little home at £45 a year close by here.” The address was 60 Harrington Street NW, and apparently he planned to use the “little home” as a “studio.”
Sickert would accumulate studios and then abandon them after a short while. It was well known among his acquaintances that these hidden rat holes were located on mean streets. His friend and fellow artist William Rothenstein, whom he met in 1889, wrote of Sickert’s taste “for the dingy lodging-house atmosphere.” Rothenstein said that Sickert was a “genius” at ferreting out the gloomiest and most off-putting rooms to work in, and this predilection was a source of bafflement to others. Rothenstein described Sickert as an “aristocrat by nature” who “had cultivated a strange taste for life below the stairs.”
Denys Sutton wrote that “Sickert’s restlessness was a dominating feature of his character.” It was typical for him to always have “studios elsewhere, for at all times he cherished his freedom.” Sutton says that Sickert often dined out alone, and that even after he married Ellen, he would go by himself to the music halls or get up in the middle of a dinner in his own home to head out to a performance. Then he would begin another one of his long walks home. Or perhaps go to one of his secret rooms, somehow meandering into the violent East End, walking the dark streets alone, a small parcel or a Gladstone bag in hand, presumably to hold his art supplies.
According to Sutton, during one of these ambles, Sickert was dressed in a loud checked suit and came upon several girls on Copenhagen Street, about a mile northwest of Shoreditch. The girls scattered in terror, screaming “Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper!” In a slightly different but more telling account, Sickert told his friends that it was he who called out, “Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper.”
“I told her I was Jack the Ripper and I took my hat off,” the Ripper wrote in a letter on November 19, 1888. Three days later the Ripper wrote a letter saying he was in Liverpool and “met a young woman in Scotland Road…. I smiled at her and she calls out Jack the ripper. She dident know how right she was.” About this same time, an article appeared in the Sunday Dispatch reporting that in Liverpool, an elderly woman was sitting in Shiel Park when a “respectable looking man, dressed in a black coat, light trousers, and a soft felt hat,” pulled out a long thin knife. He said he planned to kill as many women in Liverpool as he could and send the ears of the first victim to the editor of the Liverpool newspaper.
Sickert made his sketches at Gatti’s in an era when there were few inciting props available to psychopathic violent offenders. Today’s rapist, pedophile, or murderer has plenty to choose from: photographs, audio-tapes, and videotapes of his victims being tortured or killed; and violent pornography found in magazines, movies, books, computer software, and on Internet sites. In 1888 there were few visual or audible aids available for a psychopath to fuel violent fantasies. Sickert’s props would have been souvenirs or trophies from the victim, paintings and drawings, and the live entertainment of the theater and the music halls. He also could have made dry runs; the terrifying of the old woman in Liverpool could simply have been one of dozens or even hundreds.
Psychopathic killers often try out their modus operandi before going through the plan. Practice makes perfect, and the killer gets a thrill from the near-strike. The pulse picks up. Adrenaline surges. The killer will continue to go through the ritual, each time getting closer to actualizing the violence. Killers who mimic law enforcement officers have been known to install emergency grille lights or attach magnetic bubble lights to the roofs of their cars and pull over women drivers many times before actually going through with the abduction and murder.