Perhaps Sickert’s letter from St. Valery was sincere. Perhaps he did want Blanche’s advice. Or perhaps the truth is that Sickert was exhausted and paranoid and on the run, and thought it wise to supply himself with an alibi. Apart from this note to Blanche, I could find nothing to suggest that Sickert spent any time at all in France during the late summer, early fall, or winter of 1888. The bathing – or swimming – season for Normandy was over as well. It began in early July and by the end of September, Sickert’s friends closed down their Dieppe homes and studios.
Sickert’s salon of artists and prominent friends would have scattered until the following summer. I wonder if it seemed a little strange to Ellen that her husband planned to join “his people” in Normandy for several weeks when nobody was likely to be there. I wonder if she saw her husband much at all, and if she did, did she think he was behaving a bit oddly? In August, Sickert the compulsive letter writer sent a note to Blanche, apologizing for not “writing for so long. I have been very hard at work, and I find it very difficult to find 5 minutes to write a letter.”
There is no reason to believe Sickert’s “work” was related to the toils of his trade – beyond his going to music halls and seeking inspiration from the streets all hours of the night. His artistic productivity wasn’t at its usual high from August through the rest of the year. Paintings “circa 1888” are few, and there is no guarantee that “circa” didn’t mean a year or two earlier or later. I found only one published article from 1888, and that was in the spring. It seems that Sickert avoided his friends for much of that year. There is no indication he summered in Dieppe – which was very unusual. No matter where he went or when, it is clear that Sickert wasn’t following his usual routines, if one could call anything Sickert did “routine.”
In the late nineteenth century, passports, visas, and other forms of identification were not required to travel on the Continent. (However, by late summer of 1888, passports were required to enter Germany from France.) There is no mention of Sickert having any form of “picture identification” until World War I, when he and his second wife, Christine, were issued laissez-passers to show guards at tunnels, railway crossings, and other strategic places as they traveled about France.
Entering France from England was an easy and friendly transition and remained so during the years Sickert traveled to and fro. Crossing the English Channel in the late 1800s could take as little as four hours in good weather. One could travel by express train and “fast” steamer seven days a week, twice daily, with the trains leaving Victoria Station at 10:30 in the morning or London Bridge at 10:45. The steamer sailed out of Newhaven at 12:45 P.M. and arrived in Dieppe around dinnertime. A single, one-way first-class ticket to Dieppe was twenty-four shillings, second class was seventeen shillings, and part of this Express Tidal Service included trains from Dieppe straight through to Rouen and Paris.
Sickert’s mother claimed she never knew when her son would suddenly go to France or suddenly come back. Maybe he hopped back and forth from England to Dieppe while the Ripper crimes were going on in 1888, but if he did, it was probably to cool off. He had been going to Dieppe since childhood and kept several places there. French death and crime statistics for the Victorian era do not seem to have survived, and it was not possible to find records of homicides then that might even remotely resemble the Ripper’s crimes. But Dieppe was simply too small a town to commit lust-murders and get away with it.
During the days I spent in Dieppe, with its narrow old streets and passageways, its rocky shore and soaring cliffs that sheer off into the Channel, I tried to see that small seaside village as a killing ground for Sickert, but I could not. His work while he was in Dieppe reflects a different spirit. Most of the pictures he painted there are in lovely colors, his depictions of buildings inspiring. There is nothing morbid or violent in most of his Normandy art. It is as if Dieppe brought out the side of Sickert’s face that is turned to the light in his Jekyll and Hyde self-portraits.