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

"I know how good it is," Ellen writes of Sickert's art. "I have always known," she wrote Blanche.

By 1881, the young, beautiful, blue-eyed Walter had attached himself to a woman whose yearly stipend was as much as 250 pounds - more than what some young physicians earned then. There was no reason why Sickert shouldn't enroll in the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. The 1881 Slade syllabus indicates courses strong in the sciences: antique and life classes, etching, sculpture, archaeology, perspective, chemistry of materials used in painting, and anatomy. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there were lectures that focused on "the bones, joints and muscles."

During Sickert's time at the Slade he became friendly with Whistler, but how they actually met is hazy. One story is that Sickert and Whistler were in the audience at the Lyceum while Ellen Terry was performing. During the curtain call, Sickert hurled roses weighted with lead onto the stage and the fragrant missile almost hit Henry Irving, who was not amused. Whistler's infamous "ha ha!" could be heard in the crowd. As the audience was filing out, Whistler made a point of meeting the audacious young man.

Other accounts suggest that Sickert "ran into" Whistler somewhere or followed him into a shop or met him at a party or through the Cobden daughters. Sickert was never accused of being shy or reticent about whatever it was he wanted at the moment. Whistler supposedly persuaded Sickert to stop wasting his time with art school and come to work in a real studio with him. The young man left the Slade School and became Whistler's apprentice. He worked side by side with the Master, but what his days with Ellen were like is a blank.

Available references to the early years of Ellen and Walter's marriage do not indicate an attraction to each other or the slightest fragrant scent of romance. In Jacques-Emile Blanche's memoirs, he refers to Ellen as so much older than Sickert that she "might have been taken for his elder sister." He thought the couple were well matched "intellectually" and observed that they allowed each other "perfect freedom." During visits to Blanche in Dieppe, Sickert paid little attention to Ellen, but would disappear in the narrow streets and courtyards, and into his rented "mysterious rooms in harbour quarters, sheds from which all were excluded."

The divorce decree cites that Sickert was guilty of "adultery coupled with desertion for the space of 2 years 6c upwards without reasonable excuse." Yet it was really Ellen who eventually refused to live with Sickert. And there is no evidence he had even one sexual transgression. Ellen's divorce petition states that Sickert deserted her on September 29, 1896, and that on or about April 21, 1898, he committed adultery with a woman whose name was "unknown" to Ellen. This alleged tryst supposedly occurred at the Midland Grand Hotel in London. Then, on May 4, 1899, Sickert supposedly committed adultery again with a woman whose name also was "unknown" to Ellen.

Various biographers explain that the reason the couple separated on September 29th is that on this day Sickert admitted to Ellen that he wasn't faithful to her and never had been. If so, it would appear that his affairs - assuming he had more than the two mentioned in the divorce decree - were with "unknown" women. Nothing I have read would indicate that he was amorous toward women or given to inappropriate touching or invitations - even if he did use vulgar language. Fellow artist Nina Hamnett, a notorious bohemian who rarely turned down liquor or sex, writes in her autobiography that Sickert would walk her home when she was drunk; she stayed with him in France. The kiss-and-tell Nina says not a word about Sickert ever so much as flirting with her.

Ellen may really have believed Sickert was a womanizer, or her claims may have been something of a red herring if the humiliating truth was that they never consummated their marriage. In the late nineteenth century, a woman had no legal grounds to leave her husband unless he was unfaithful and cruel or deserted her. She and Sickert agreed to these claims. He did not fight her. One would assume she knew about his damaged penis, but it is possible the brotherly and sisterly couple never undressed around each other or attempted sex.

During their divorce proceedings, Ellen wrote that Sickert promised if she would "give him one more chance he [would] be a different man, that I am the only person he has ever really cared for - that he has no longer those relations with [unknown]." Ellen's lawyer, she wrote, felt certain Sickert was "sincere - but that taking into consideration his previous life - amp; judging as far as he could of his character from his face amp; manner he does not believe he is capable of keeping any resolve that he made, and his deliberate advice to me is to go on with the divorce.

"I am dreadfully upset amp;t have hardly done anything but cry ever since," Ellen wrote Janie. "I see how far from dead is my affection for him."

Sickert's roles changed like the light and shadow he painted on his canvases.

A shape should not have lines because nature doesn't, and forms reveal themselves in tones, shades, and the way light holds them. Sickert's life had no lines or boundaries, and his shape changed with every tilt and touch of his enigmatic moods and hidden purposes.

Those who knew him as well as those he brushed past only now and then accepted that being Sickert meant being the "chameleon," the "poseur." He was Sickert in the loud checked coat walking all hours through London's foreboding alleyways and streets. He was Sickert the farmer or country squire or tramp or bespectacled masher in the bowler hat or dandy in black tie or the eccentric wearing bedroom slippers to meet the train. He was Jack the Ripper with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a red scarf around his neck, working in the gloom of a studio illuminated by the feeble glow from a bull's-eye lantern.

Victorian writer and critic Clive Bell's relationship with Sickert was one of mutual love-hate, and Bell quipped that on any given day Sickert might be John Bull, Voltaire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, a cook, a dandy, a swell, a bookmaker, a solicitor. Bell believed Sickert wasn't the scholar he was reputed to be and appeared to "know a great deal more than he did," even if he was the greatest British painter since Constable, Bell observed. But one "could never feel sure that their Sickert was Sickert's Sickert, or that Sickert's Sickert corresponded with any ultimate reality." He was a man of "no standards," and in Bell's words, Sickert did not feel "possessively and affectionately about anything which was not part of himself."

Ellen was part of Sickert's self. He had use for her. He could not see her as a separate human being because all people and all things were extensions of Sickert. She was still in Ireland with Janie when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows were murdered and when George Lusk, the head of the East End Vigilance Committee, received half of a human kidney by post on October 16th. Almost two weeks later, the curator of the pathology museum of the London Hospital, Dr. Thomas Openshaw, received the letter written on A Pirie amp; Sons watermarked paper and signed "Jack the Ripper."

"Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny… I wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds."

The kidney was suspected of being Catherine Eddows's, and probably was unless the Ripper managed to get half of a human kidney from somewhere else. The organ was anatomically preserved at the Royal London Hospital until it became so disintegrated the hospital disposed of it in the 1950s - about the time Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA.

In centuries past, bodies and body parts were preserved in "spirits" or alcoholic beverages such as wine. Some hospitals during the Ripper's time used glycerine. When a person of high status died aboard ship and required a proper burial, the only way to preserve the body was in mead or whatever spirits were handy. If John Smith, the founding father of Virginia, had died during his voyage to the New World, most likely he would have been returned to London pickled in a keg.