Patricia Cornwell - Portrait Of A Killer - Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son's attention to a memorial. "There's a name you will never remember," Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read

When he was eighty years old, Walter Sickert could still recall the inscription and write it without error.

Oswald did not encourage any of his children to pursue art, but from an early age, Walter could not resist drawing, painting, and making models out of wax. Sickert would claim that what he knew of art theory he had learned from his father, who in the 1870s used to take him to the Royal Academy at Burlington House to study the paintings of the "Old Masters." Searches through collections of Sickert archives suggest that Oswald may have had a hand in Walter's development as a draftsman as well. In Islington Public Libraries in north London, there is a collection of sketches that have been attributed to Oswald but are now believed by historians and art experts to include sketches made by the father's talented son, Walter. It is possible that Oswald critiqued Walter's early artistic efforts.

Many of the drawings are clearly the efforts of the tentative but gifted hand of someone learning to sketch street scenes, buildings, and figures. But the creative mind guiding the hand is disturbed, violent, and morbid, a mind that takes delight in conjuring up a cauldron of men being boiled alive and demonic characters with long, pointed faces, tails, and evil smiles. A favorite theme is that of soldiers storming castles and battling one another. A knight abducts a buxom maiden and rides off with her as she pleads not to be raped or murdered or both. Sickert could have been describing his own juvenilia when he described an etching made by Karel du Jardin in 1652: It is, he said, a ghastly scene of a "cavalier" on horseback pausing to look at a "stripped" and "hacked" up "corpse," while troops "with spears and pennants" ride off in the distance.

The most violent amateurish drawing in this collection depicts a bosomy woman in a low-cut dress sitting in a chair, her hands bound behind her, her head thrown back as a right-handed man plunges a knife into the center of her chest at the level of her sternum. She has additional wounds on the left side of her chest, a wound on the left side of her neck - where the carotid artery would be - and possibly a wound below her left eye. Her killer's only facial feature is a slight smile, and he is dressed in a suit. Opposite this sketch, on the same scrap of rectangular paper, there is a crouching, frightening-looking man who is about to spring on a woman dressed in long skirt, shawl, and bonnet.

While I have found no hint that Oswald Sickert was sexually violent, he could be mean-spirited and stony. His favorite target was his daughter. Helena's fear of him was so great that she would tremble in his presence. He showed not a whit of sympathy for her while she was bedridden with rheumatic fever for two years. When she recovered at the age of seven, she was very weak and had poor control of her legs. She dreaded it when her father began forcing her to take walks with him. During these outings, he never spoke. To her, his silence was more frightening than his harsh words.

When she awkwardly ran to keep up with his relentless pace, or if she clumsily bumped into him, "he would," Helena wrote, "then silently take me by the shoulder and silently turn me into the opposite direction, where I was apt to run into the wall or gutter." Her mother never intervened on her behalf. Nelly preferred her "pretty little fellows" with their fair hair and sailor suits to her homely, red-headed daughter.

Walter was by far the prettiest of the fair little fellows and the "cleverest." He usually got his way through manipulation, deception, or charm. He was the leader, and other children did what he demanded, even if Walter's "games" were unfair or unpleasant. When playing chess, he thought nothing of changing the rules as it suited him, such as making it possible to check the king without consequences. When Walter was a bit older, after the family had moved to England in 1868, he began recruiting friends and siblings to play scenes from Shakespeare, and some of his stage direction was nasty and degrading. In an unpublished draft of Helena's memoirs, she recalled:

I must have been a child when [Walter] roped us in to rehearse the three witches to his Macbeth in a disused quarry near Newquay, which innocently I thought was really called "The Pit of Achaeron." Here he drilled us very severely. I was made (being appropriately thin and red-haired) to discard my dress amp; shoes amp; stockings, in order to brood over the witches cauldron, or stride around it, regardless of thorns and sharp stones, in my eyes the acrid smoke of scorching seaweed.

This account as well as other telling ones were softened or deleted by the time Helena's memoirs were published, and were it not for a six-page handwritten remnant that was donated to the National Art Library of the Victoria amp; Albert Museum, there would be little known about Walter's youthful tendencies. I suspect that much has been censored.

In the Victorian era and the early 1900s it was unheard of to tell all, especially about family. Queen Victoria herself could have burned down one of her palaces with the conflagration she made of her private papers. By the time Helena published her memoirs in 1935, her brother Walter was seventy-five years old and a British icon hailed by young artists as the roi, or king. His sister might have had second thoughts about lacerating him in her book. She was one of the few people he was never able to dominate, and the two of them were never close.

It isn't clear that she even knew quite what to make of him. He was "… at once the most fickle and the most constant of creatures… unreasonable, but always rationalizing. Utterly neglectful of his friends and relations in normal times and capable of the utmost kindness, generosity and resourcefulness in crises - never bored, except by people."

Sickert scholars agree that he was a "handful." He was "brilliant" with a "volatile temperament," and when he was three, his mother told a family friend that he was "perverse and wayward" - a physically strong boy whose "tenderness" easily turns to "temper." He was a master of persuasion and, like his father, disdainful of religion. Authority did not exist any more than God did. In school, Walter was energetic and intellectually keen, but he did not abide by rules. Those who have written about his life are vague and elusive about his "irregularities," as his biographer Denys Sutton put it.

When Sickert was ten, he was "removed" from a boarding school in Reading, where, he would later say, he found the "horrible old schoolmistress" intolerable. He was expelled from University College School for reasons unknown. Around 1870, he attended Bayswater Collegiate School, and for two years, he was a student at Kings College School. In 1878, he made first class honors on his Matriculation exam (the exam all schoolchildren took in their last year), but he did not attend a university.

Sickert's arrogance, his lack of feeling, and his extraordinary power of manipulation are typical of psychopaths. What is not so apparent - although it betrays itself in Walter's fits of temper and sadistic games - is the anger that simmered beneath his bewitching surface. Add rage to emotional detachment and a total lack of compassion or remorse, and the resulting alchemy turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The precise chemistry of this transformation is a mixture of the physical and spiritual that we may never fully understand. Does an abnormal frontal lobe cause a person to become a psychopath? Or does the frontal lobe become abnormal because the person is a psychopath? We don't yet know the cause.