Murder, Music Hall and Naked Women
Murder, Music Hall and Naked Women
Was the Victorian painter Walter Sickert actually Jack the Ripper?
Walter Sickert was the bad boy of art in his day, and one of my favourite artists of the late 19th century. He was unusual in depicting scenes of working-class life in Victorian and Edwardian London. Sickert always had one eye on the press and picked up on stories that caught the popular imagination.
In 1907 a woman was found murdered in a rented room in an area of London called Camden. The newspapers at this time went crazy about this story and it inspired a series of paintings from Sickert, which he called The Camden Town Murder.
More stuff here on Walter Sickert if you’re interested to know more:
A couple of reviews of the Tate exhibition of Walter Sickert on at the moment in London:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/01/walter-sickert-review-tate-britain-london
A few other links and bits n bobs you might be interested in:
Virginia Woolf, the famous author, wrote an essay 'Walter Sickert: a conversation' in 1933 about Sickert's painting Ennui (1914).
Here is a video of the biographer Professor Hermione Lee reading some of that essay about Sickert's Ennui.
A short article on Sickert's influence on the next generation of English artists:
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/sickert-effect
An article on Sickert as an art critic:
An article on Sickert's interest in the theatre:
And one on his interest in photography:
https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-37-summer-2016/sickert-and-photography
So interesting. Really enjoy how you walk through the paintings. He's quite dark isn't he. Was there something a bit voyeuristic about him? He was a well-to-do man 'watching' the working classes. I wonder what he thought about the people he painted.