Verdict as open as ever

Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper, a name given by the press to the most notorious serial murderer in Britain, about whom virtually nothing is known. Cornwell squarely lays these atrocious murders of East End women in 1888 at the door of the painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). When this story first broke on US television late last year, Cornwell said that if she were to be proved wrong ‘not only will I feel horrible about it, but I will look terrible’. These may well be prophetic words.

I have no intention of defending Sickert on the grounds that he is untouchable on account of his having long been accepted as the leading artist of his period in Britain. Cornwell pits this high-celebrity profile against the grim, anonymous lives of the Ripper’s victims – poor, casual prostitutes who needed ‘someone to care about them for once’. This is both sentimental and not to the point in a murder investigation. But I do have a long knowledge of Sickert’s work and of his complex life and character that leads me, assisted by other writers on Sickert, to put forward biographical evidence and a reading of Sickert’s paintings that frequently contradict Cornwell’s findings.

How did Cornwell choose Sickert in the first place? He was not one of the suspects investigated at the time and his name does not occur in the literature devoted to the Ripper until over 80 years after the crimes. The connection was made by Stephen Knight in a book called Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), in which Sickert was implicated as an accessory to the murders on the testimony of Joseph Gormon Sickert, who says he is the painter’s illegitimate son, born in October 1925 when Sickert was 65.