Sickert painted the Ripper's crimes

The argument

Walter Sickert was a painter who took a strong interest in the Jack the Ripper case, and the argument for treating him as a suspect is built from his work rather than from any physical evidence. In 1907 he completed a painting entitled Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, based on time he spent staying in a room said to have been used by the Ripper. Proponents treat both the choice of subject and the circumstances behind it as significant: the painting records an interest pursued to the point of taking a room associated with the murders and working from it. Other canvases are read in the same way. His 1908 work The Camden Town Murder depicts the body of a murdered prostitute positioned, according to those who advance this theory, in a strikingly similar way to the autopsy photographs of the actual Ripper killings. The claim rests on that correspondence. Autopsy images were not material a painter would ordinarily have encountered, so a resemblance between them and a composed picture is taken to indicate knowledge of the scenes rather than invention of a similar one. The inference proponents draw is that the pattern exceeds what artistic curiosity accounts for. A painter might treat a notorious crime as a subject, but this body of work is argued to go further: it returns to the murders repeatedly, reproduces details of how the bodies were found, and does so in a career that also included residence in a room connected to the case. Taken together, the obsession and the apparent clues in the paintings are said to suggest that Sickert was deeply involved with the crimes themselves. The argument is one of inference from circumstantial material, and it identifies Sickert as the Ripper on the basis of what his paintings are held to reveal about what their maker knew.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The inference would convict a large portion of the era. Fascination with the Whitechapel murders was a mass phenomenon in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and painting, writing about or living among the sites of a famous crime is the behaviour of someone interested in a famous crime. Applied consistently, the reasoning implicates every true-crime novelist and documentary maker since; artistic preoccupation is evidence of preoccupation and nothing further. The individual items are weaker than they look. The title of 'Jack the Ripper's Bedroom' rests on a landlady's assertion that a former lodger had been the murderer, which is hearsay from twenty years afterwards and was the kind of claim many London landladies made. The Camden Town paintings take their subject from the killing of Emily Dimmock in 1907, a widely reported contemporary case with its own trial, so a resemblance to a murdered woman in those canvases is explained by the murder Sickert was actually depicting. Compositional similarity to autopsy photographs is also a judgement of the eye, made by people who already suspect him, and the poses of reclining figures are a staple of the period's painting. The positive case is thin where it would need to be strongest. Documentary evidence, including family correspondence cited by critics of the theory, places Sickert outside England during part of 1888, and the forensic claims advanced in the best-known books — mitochondrial sequencing and paper matching — do not exclude large numbers of other people and have not been accepted by most researchers. Against named suspects who drew contemporary police attention, and against the position that no single person committed the canonical murders, an argument resting on a painter's subject matter is the weakest form of identification available.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The painting's title rests on a landlady's claim, made two decades later, that a former lodger had been the murderer — hearsay of a kind common at the time — and interest in a famous crime was a mass phenomenon in the period, so the premise establishes preoccupation rather than involvement. [Rejecting P2] The Camden Town works take their subject from the 1907 killing of Emily Dimmock, a widely reported contemporary case with its own trial, which accounts for a murdered woman appearing in them; and compositional resemblance to autopsy photographs is a judgement made by those already persuaded, in a period whose painting is full of reclining figures. [Rejecting C] The identification also runs against documentary evidence, including family correspondence placing Sickert outside England during part of 1888, while the forensic claims advanced for the theory do not exclude large numbers of other people and have not been widely accepted — leaving subject matter as the weakest available basis for naming a suspect.