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

To look at these faint pencil sketches in the collections at the Tate Gallery, the University of Reading, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and Leeds City Art Gallery is to slip inside Sickert's mind and emotions. His hasty artistic strokes capture what he saw as he sat in a music hall, gazing up at the stage. They are snapshots made through the lens of his own fantasies. While other men leered and egged on the half-naked performers, Sickert sketched dismembered female body parts.

One might argue that these drawings were Sickert's attempt at improving his technique. Hands, for example, are difficult, and some of the greatest painters had their struggles with hands. But when Sickert was sitting in his box or several rows back from the stage and making sketches on his little bits of paper, he wasn't perfecting his art. He was drawing a head severed from its neck; arms with no hands; a torso with no arms; plump chopped-off naked thighs; a limbless torso with breasts bulging out of a low-cut costume.

One might also argue that Sickert was thinking about new ways to reposition the body in a manner that wasn't stilted or posed. Perhaps he was trying out new methods. He would have seen Degas's pastel nudes. It could simply be that Sickert was following the lead of his idol, who had moved far beyond the old, static way of using draped models in the studio and was experimenting with more natural human postures and motion. But when Degas drew an arm in isolation, he was practicing technique, and the purpose of that arm was to be used in a painting.

The female body parts Sickert depicted in his music-hall sketches were rarely if ever used in any of his studies, pastels, etchings, or paintings. His penciled-in limbs and torsos seem to have been drawn simply for the sake of drawing them as he sat in the audience watching the scantily dressed Queenie Lawrence in her lily-white lingerie or the nine-year-old Little Flossie perform. Sickert did not depict male figures or male body parts in quite the same way. There is nothing about his sketches of males to suggest the subjects are being victimized, except for a pencil drawing titled He Killed His Father in a Fight. In it, a man is hacking to death a figure on a bloody bed.

Sickert's female torsos, severed heads, and limbs are images from a violent imagination. One can look at sketches his artist friend Wilson Steer made at the same time and in some of the same music halls and note a marked difference in Steer's depictions of the human body and facial expressions. He may have drawn a female head, but it does not seem chopped off at the neck. He may have drawn the ankles and feet of a ballerina, but they are obviously alive, poised on toe, the calf muscles bunching. Nothing about Steer's sketches looks dead. Sickert's sketched body parts have none of the tension of life but are limp and disconnected.

His 1888 music-hall sketches and the notes he scribbled on them place him in Gatti's on February 4th through March 24th; May 25th; June 4th through the 7th; July 8th, 30th, and 31st; and August 1st and 4th. Gatti's and other music halls Sickert visited in 1888, such as the Bedford, were by law supposed to end their performances and sales of liquor no later than half past midnight. If we assume that Sickert stayed until the entertainment ended, he would have been on London's streets on many early mornings. Then he could wander. Apparently Sickert didn't require much sleep.

Artist Marjorie Lilly recalled in her memoir of him that "he only seemed to relax in odd snatches of sleep during the day and was seldom in bed until after midnight, when he might get up again to wander about the streets until dawn." Lilly, who once shared a studio and a house with Sickert, observed that his habit was to wander after the music-hall performances. This peripatetic behavior, she added, continued throughout his life. Whenever "an idea tormented him" he would "thresh round the streets until dawn, lost in meditation."

Lilly knew Sickert well until his death in 1942, and many of the details in her book tell far more about her mentor and friend than she perhaps realized. Consistently, she refers to his wanderings, his nocturnal habits, his secrecy, and his well-known habit of having as many as three or four studios, their locations or purposes unknown. She also has numerous odd recollections of his preference for dark basements. "Huge, eerie, with winding passages and one black dungeon succeeding another like some horror story by Edgar Allan Poe," is how she describes them.

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.