Walter Sickert

There's been a great deal of media attention over the last week or so (early December 2001) about crime writer Patricia Cornwell's attempts to prove that the British artist Walter Sickert was the real Jack the Ripper. The Answerbank has dealt with these allegations and the evidence Cornwell feels she has uncovered elsewhere (find the article here), but what about the artist and his work

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Q. What's Sickert's story

A. Born on 31 May 1860 in Munich, Walter Richard Sickert was the son of a Danish-born German draftsman who moved his family to England in 1868. After several years on the stage, in 1881 Sickert went to the Slade School in London. In 1882 he became a pupil of and studio assistant to James McNeill Whistler. The next year, armed with letters of introduction to Manet and Degas, he was entrusted with seeing Whistler's Portrait of the Artist's Mother safely to Paris, where it was to be shown at the Salon. Manet was ill, but Degas received the young painter, and their friendship lasted until Degas's death in 1917.

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Sickert's first pictures of London music-hall interiors, which became one of his most typical subjects, appeared in 1886 at the New English Art Club, where he continued to exhibit until 1917.

Sickert spent most of his summers in Dieppe and worked for a time in Venice. Returning to London in 1905, he became the focus of a group of painters that included Augustus John and Lucien Pissarro, the son of the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Through contact with Pissarro, Sickert's work began to show the influence of Pointillism - a style of painting with dots, also called Neo-Impressionism.

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In 1911 he founded the Camden Town Group, the original members of which included John and Pissarro along with Spencer Gore and Henry Lamb. Three years later the group was enlarged and renamed the London Group. Among the members were Jacob Epstein and Paul and John Nash.

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Sickert painted at Brighton and Bath in the 1920s and '30s and wrote occasional criticism.

He became an associate of the Royal Academy in 1924 and an academician ten years later. But shortly afterwards he resigned in protest against the hostile attitude of the president toward the work of Epstein. In 1941 Sickert was honoured with a one-man exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The following year he died in Bath on January 22.

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Q. Why is he important in the history of British art

A. Between the 1880s to the 1930s he was one of London's most influential artists. He was a link with the revolutionary French painters of the late 19th century and an influence on later artists, such as Francis Bacon.

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Q. What did he paint

A. He encouraged artists to 'seek beauty in everyday urban surroundings', and he practised what he preached in his music-hall scenes. He looked for life and movement in a painting: there is always something happening in his work and he was adamant about his models not posing, always painting the sitter in natural light and surroundings.

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His early work was, not surprisingly, influenced by Whistler and Degas and concerned, like theirs, with form and composition rather than colour and light.

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In 1909 he produced a series of paintings titled the 'Camden Town Murders' based on the Ripper murders of 1888. He had a morbid fascination with sexual violence and the Ripper's crimes in particular, and this is one of the facts which sparked the speculation about his actual involvement.

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Much of his later career was devoted to teaching and writing. The merit of his later paintings, which were frequently re-creations of press photographs or Victorian illustrations, is hotly contested. They have been regarded both as a real slump in quality by some and as his most interesting work by others.

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Q. Hasn't Patricia Cornwell actually destroyed one of Sickert's paintings in her quest to prove her theory

A. Yes she has. After spending �2m buying up over 30 of his paintings, some of his letters and even his writing desk, she actually took one of the paintings apart in a bid to find some clues. Naturally experts are horrified, with one saying that 'everyone knows this stuff about Sickert is nonsense', and Richard Stone, who curated the last big Sickert show in London in 1992, said: ' Even if Sickert were Jack the Ripper it would not justify this. It's like taking a Caravaggio apart to investigate the stabbing he was involved in. It's mad.'

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Q. Where can his pictures be seen

In the flesh at Tate Britain, the Courtauld Institute and Islington Public Library in London, as well as Liverpool Art Gallery; outside the UK in Dieppe, Melbourne, New York (MOMA), Ottawa, Sydney, Yale University and, of course, Patricia Cornwell's house. To find links to images on the web go to

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/sickert_walter_richard.html

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See also the article on the Ripper's letters

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Simon Smith