Was Walter Sickert the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper? This grimily realist painter has been fingered for the Whitechapel murders by Ripperologists including Patricia Cornwell. But I didn’t expect to find damning evidence in a serious survey of his work at Tate Britain. Not that they flaunt it. But when I got to the last essay in the handsome catalogue my jaw dropped.
In 1888, this actor and artist – who was born in Munich in 1860 and moved to Britain as a child – appears to have written a series of letters to the police, claiming to be the killer. He put his drawing skills to macabre use in these missives, drawing caricatures of brutal male faces, sketches of men with knives standing over women’s bodies.
