ART AND IMAGES IN PSYCHIATRY

SECTION EDITOR: JAMES C. HARRIS, MD The Camden Town Murder (or What Shall We Do About the Rent?) Words are an impure medium; better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint...[Sick- ert] likes to set his characters in motion, to watch them in action...Thefigures are motionless, of course, but each has been seized in a moment of crisis; it is difficult to look at them and not invent a plot, to hear what they are saying. Virginia Woolf1(p23)

HROUGHOUT HIS LIFE,WALTER RICHARD SICK- Sickert settled in 1905 in rooms at 6 Mornington Crescent, ert (1860-1942), who began his career as a stage Camden Town, a working-class section of north London, a actor, was renowned for his imaginative, in- “dingy and unfashionable”5(p26) place. There Sickert planned to deed protean, ability to change “his appear- depict the complexities and brutality of modern working- ance, opinions, or style of life.”2(p8) He loved dis- class life. To capture the dramatic moment, he combined the guiseT and frequently changed his identity as he played out many symbolist sensitivity of his teacher James McNeill Whistler, roles. Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell concluded that one of which evoked a sense of mystery and indeterminacy, with the those roles was a real-life one, that of the notorious London exacting realistic techniques he learned from Edgar Degas, who Whitechapel murderer, Jack the Ripper, who slaughtered and had earlier focused on day-to-day life in Paris. mutilated middle-aged prostitutes. Following up a comment made Shortly after Sickert moved to Camden Town, his land- by a deputy assistant commissioner, John Grieve, at Scotland lady, Louisa Jones, confided to him that the rooms he rented Yard about Sickert and his painting The Camden Town Murder were previously occupied by a veterinary student whom she (cover),3(p11) Cornwell employed modern forensic diagnostic meth- believed was Jack the Ripper. From her account, the killing ods along with a great deal of imaginative speculation in her book stopped after the student’s death. Her story captured Sickert’s that proposed that Sickert was the Whitechapel murderer, Por- interest; he painted his room as Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom (1906). trait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper: Case Closed.3 Because Sickert was A contemporary of his noted that Sickert, who enjoyed role play cremated and had no living descendents, Cornwell, seeking evi- when he painted, became preoccupied with the Ripper crimes. dence, purchased his writing desk, some letters, and more than Later, in September 1908, when a prostitute, Emily Dimmock, 30 of his paintings. She denies destroying paintings while seek- was murdered in Camden Town while Sickert was away in ing samples of nuclear DNA. France, old fears about Jack the Ripper were rekindled. When Cornwell found no nuclear DNA, she turned to exam- The notoriety of the case resulted in Sickert’s painting being ine mitochondrial DNA. At the time of the killings and afterward, named The Camden Town Murder. Sickert shows a clothed man nearly 600 letters arrived at the police office or at local news- sitting on a bed next to an apparently lifeless, naked woman: papers in London and other cities in England from someone, more her head is turned away from him toward the wall. No violent likely several persons, claiming to be Jack the Ripper. The hand- cause of death is evident. The apparent victim is not an attrac- writing and writing style differed from one letter to the next, so tive young prostitute but a middle-aged woman. Sickert aban- the police essentially ignored them at the time. Undeterred by doned the classical portrayal of the female nude, portraying a contemporary views about the letters, Cornwell concluded that middle-aged prostitute in her ordinary nakedness. Her body is Sickert was sufficiently talented in graphic design that, although a metaphor for the ravages of her authentic life experience. In there was no need to, he changed his handwriting and writing the early 1920s, Sickert titled his preliminary drawing for this style from one letter to the next. With this presumption, she felt painting What Shall We Do About the Rent? That title implies justified in searching for mitochondrial DNA on licked postage that we see not a murderer but an ordinary man who is dis- stamps and envelope flaps. When that testing was also inconclu- traught about his finances. sive, she hired an expert to scrutinize limited-edition watermarked Patricia Cornwell imagined his works to be mortuary por- writing paper where rare matches were found, suggesting that 3 traits, likening them to contemporary crime photographs and of Sickert’s letters, written in the years immediately following the presenting his art as forensic evidence. But Walter Sickert was crimes in different handwriting, seemingly used the same water- the antithesis of the killer: a sensitive artist seeking to use his marked quire of paper found in 2 Ripper letters (again inconclu- skills to bring attention to the grim lives of prostitutes and work- sive4(pp639, 640)). To account for his being in France when most of ing-class people. His Camden Town period was singularly pro- the killings occurred, she speculated that he could have slipped ductive.5 It was a time when Sickert empathetically sought to across the English channel to murder and returned to France un- draw the viewer into moments of crisis and human need. detected. Seeking a motive for his crime, Cornwell proposed that the anal fistula surgery Sickert had as a child in London was ac- James C. Harris, MD tually surgery on his penis that might have resulted in sexual in- adequacy, a possible motivation for his crime. Yet Sickert was mar- REFERENCES ried 3 times and had several extramarital affairs. Accusations about Jack the Ripper by Cornwell and others be- fore her led Matthew Sturgis, Sickert’s biographer, to devote a full 1. Woolf V. Walter Sickert: A Conversation. Beckenham, England: Trigon Press; 1992. 2. Corbett DP. Walter Sickert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2001. chapter, “Walter Sickert: Case Closed,” to roundly refute all such 3. Cornwell P. Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper: Case Closed. New York, NY: Berk- speculation. Yet Sturgis reluctantly concludes that the notoriety ley Publishing Group; 2003. of their books is such that the idea that Walter Sickert was Jack 4. Sturgis M. Walter Sickert: A Life. London, England: Harper Perennial; 2005. the Ripper has produced “that more insidious thing—an estab- 5. Wright B, ed. Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes. London, England: The lished fantasy”4(p642) based on imaginary circumstantial evidence. Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing; 2007.

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