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.