In three of them, she has what appears to be a thick feather boa thrown around her naked shoulders. But in the late Queen Mother's version and the one in the Tate there is no feather boa, just some indistinguishable reddish-brown shape that envelopes her left shoulder and extends across her upper arm and left breast. It wasn't until I was feeling ennui myself as I sat in the Aspen condo that I noticed a vertical crescent, rather fleshy-white, above the diva's left shoulder. The fleshy-white shape has what appears to be a slight bump on the left side that looks very much like an ear.
Upon closer inspection, the shape becomes a man's face half in the shadows. He is coming up behind the woman. She is barely turning her face as if she senses his approach. Under the low magnification of a lens, the half-shadowed face of the man is more apparent, and the woman's face begins to look like a skull. But at a higher magnification, the painting dissolves into the individual touches of Sickert's brushes. I went to London and looked at the original painting at the Tate, and I did not change my mind. I sent a transparency of the painting to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine to see if we could get a sharper look through technology.
Computerized image enhancement detects hundreds of gray shades that the human eye can't see and makes it possible for a fuzzy photograph or erased writing to become visible or discernible. While forensic image enhancement might work with bank videotapes or bad photographs, it does not work on paintings. All our efforts accomplished with Ennui was to separate Sickert's brush strokes until we ended up with the reverse of what he was doing when he put the strokes together. I was reminded, as I would be repeatedly in the Ripper case, that forensic science does not and will not ever take the place of human detection, deduction, experience, and common sense - and very hard work.
Sickert's Ennui was mentioned in the Ripper investigation long before I gave the matter a thought, but in a very different way from what I have just described. In one version of the painting, the feather-boa-enveloped diva has a white blob on her left shoulder that is slightly reminiscent of one of the stuffed doves under the glass dome on top of the dresser. Some Ripper enthusiasts insist that the "bird" is a "sea gull" and that Sickert cleverly introduced the "gull" into his painting to drop the clue that Jack the Ripper was Sir William Gull, who was Queen Victoria's surgeon. The advocates of this interpretation usually subscribe to the so-called royal conspiracy that implicates Dr. Gull and the Duke of Clarence in five Ripper murders.
The theory was advanced in the 1970s. Although my intention in this work is not to focus on who the Ripper was not, I will state categorically that he was not Dr. Gull or the Duke of Clarence. In 1888, Dr. Gull was seventy-one years old and had already suffered a stroke. The Duke of Clarence no more used a sharp blade than he was one. Eddy, as he was called, was born two months prematurely after his mother went out to watch her husband play ice hockey and apparently spent too much time being "whirled" about in a sledge. Not feeling well, she was taken back to Frogmore, where there was only a local practitioner to oversee Eddy's unexpected birth.
His developmental difficulties probably had less to do with his premature birth than they did with the small royal gene pool that spawned him. Eddy was sweet but obtuse. He was sensitive and gentle but a dismal student. He could barely ride a horse, was unimpressive during his military training, and was far too fond of clothes. The only cure his frustrated father, the Prince of Wales, and his grandmother the Queen could come up with was from time to time to launch Eddy on long voyages to distant lands.
Rumors about his sexual preferences and indiscretions continue to this day. It may be that he engaged in homosexual activity, as some books claim, but he was also involved with women. Perhaps Eddy was sexually immature and experimented with both sexes. He would not have been the first member of a royal family to play both sides of the net. Eddy's emotional attachments were to women, especially to his beautiful, doting mother, who did not seem unduly concerned that he cared more about clothes than the crown.
On July 12, 1884, Eddy's frustrated father, the Prince of Wales and future king, wrote to Eddy's German tutor, "It is with sincere regret that we learn from you that our son dawdles so dreadfully in the morning--
He will have to make up the lost time by additional study." In this unhappy seven-page missive the father wrote from Marlborough House, he is emphatic - if not desperate - that the son, who was in direct line to the throne, "must put his shoulder to the wheel."
Eddy had neither the energy nor the interest to go about preying on prostitutes, and to suggest otherwise is farcical. On the nights of at least three of the murders, he allegedly was not in London or even close by (not that he needs an alibi), and the murders continued after his untimely death on January 14,1892. Even if the royal family's surgeon, Dr. Gull, had not been elderly and infirm, he was far too consumed by fussing over the health of Queen Victoria and that of the rather frail Eddy to have had interest or time to run about Whitechapel in a royal carriage at all hours of the night, hacking up prostitutes who were blackmailing Eddy because of his scandalous "secret marriage" to one of them. Or something like that.
It is true, however, that Eddy had been blackmailed before, as evidenced by two letters he wrote to George Lewis, the formidable barrister who would later represent Whistler in a lawsuit involving Walter Sickert. Eddy wrote to Lewis in 1890 and 1891 because he had gotten himself into a compromising situation with two ladies of low standing, one of them a Miss Richardson. He was trying to disengage himself by paying for the return of letters he imprudently had written to her and another lady friend.
"I am very pleased to hear you are able to settle with Miss Richardson," Eddy wrote Lewis in November of 1890, "although?200 is rather expensive for letters." He goes on to say he heard from Miss Richardson "the other day" and that she was demanding yet another?100. Eddy promises he will "do all I can to get back" the letters he wrote to the "other lady," as well.
Two months later, Eddy writes, in "November" [crossed out] "December," 1891 from his "Cavelry [sic] Barracks" and sends Lewis a gift "in acknowledgement for the kindness you showed me the other day in getting me out of that trouble I was foolish enough to get into." But apparently "the other lady" wasn't so easily appeased because Eddy tells Lewis he had to send a friend to see her "and ask her to give up the two or three letters I had written to her… you may be certain that I shall be careful in the future not to get into any more trouble of the sort."
Whatever was in the letters the Duke of Clarence wrote to Miss Richardson and "the other lady" isn't known, but one might infer that he acted in a manner bound to cause the royal family trouble. He was well aware that news of his involvement with the sorts of women who would blackmail him would not have been well received by the public and certainly not by his grandmother. What this attempted extortion does show is that Eddy's inclination in such situations was not to have the offending parties murdered and mutilated, but to pay them off.
Sickert's works of art may contain "clues," but they are about himself and what he felt and did. His art is about what he saw, and it was filtered through an imagination that was sometimes childlike and at other times savage. The point of view in most of his works indicates that he watched people from behind. He could see them, but they could not see him. He could see his victims, but they could not see him. He would have watched Mary Ann Nichols for a while before he struck. He would have determined her degree of drunkenness and worked out his best approach.