This took place in Paris, according to the story Sickert told to writer Osbert Sitwell. Sickert said he needed the knives to help slash Whistler's paintings. The Master had a habit of being discontented with his work, and when all else failed, he destroyed his art. Burning was one method. Cutting up paintings was another. While Sickert was an apprentice, he probably would have assisted in ripping up canvases, just as he claimed, and perhaps with the very knives he mentioned to Sitwell. Exactly when those knives would have been purchased can't be determined, but it was most likely between 1885 and 1887 or early 1888. Before 1885, Sickert wasn't married. In 1888 Whistler was, and his relationship with Sickert was tapering off and would end entirely less than ten years later.
An artist destroying a painting that he or she has grown to hate is in some measure analogous to a killer destroying the face of a victim. The destruction could be an effort to eradicate an object that causes the artist frustration and rage. Or it could be an attempt to ruin what one can't possess, whether it is artistic perfection or another human being. If one wants sex and can't have it, to destroy the object of lust is to make it no longer desirable.
Night after night, Sickert watched sexually provocative performances at music halls. During much of his career, he would sketch nude female models. He spent time behind locked studio doors, staring, even touching, but never consummating except through a pencil, a brush, a palette knife. If he was capable of sexual desire but completely incapable of gratifying it, his frustration must have been agonizing and enraging. In the early 1920s, he was painting portraits of a young art student named Ciceley Hey, and one day when he was alone with her in the studio, he sat next to her on the sofa and without warning or explanation, started screaming.
One of the portraits he painted of her is Death and the Maiden. At some point between the early 1920s and his death in 1942, he gave her Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. Where the painting had been since its completion in 1908, no one seems to know. Why he gave it to Ciceley Hey is also a mystery, unless one chooses to suppose that he entertained sexually violent fantasies about her. If she thought there was anything peculiar about Sickert's producing a foreboding piece of work with an equally foreboding title, I am unaware of it.
Perhaps one reason Sickert liked his models ugly is that he preferred to be around flesh he did not desire. Perhaps murder and mutilation were a powerful cathartic for his frustration and rage, and a way to destroy his desire. This is not to say he lusted after prostitutes. But they represented sex. They represented his immoral grandmother, the Irish dancer, whose fault it may have been - in Sickert's twisted psyche - that he was born with a severe deformity. One can offer conjectures that may sound reasonable, but they will never comprise the whole truth. Why any person has such a disregard for life that he or she enjoys destroying it is beyond comprehension.
The theory that each victim's throat was cut while she was lying on the ground remained the predominant one even after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows. Physicians and police were convinced that based on blood patterns, the women could not have been standing when the killer severed their carotid arteries. Possibly what the doctors were assuming was that arterial bleeding would have spurted a certain distance and at a certain height had the victims been on their feet. There may also have been an assumption that the victims lay down to have sex.
Prostitutes weren't likely to lie down on hard pavers or in mud or wet grass, and the doctors were not interpreting blood patterns based on scientific testing. In modern laboratories, blood spatter experts routinely conduct experiments with blood to get a better idea of how it drips, flies, sprays, spurts, and spatters according to the laws of physics. In 1888, no one working the Ripper cases was spending his time researching how far or how high blood arced when an upright person's carotid artery was cut.
No one knew about the back spatter pattern caused by the repeated swinging or stabbing motions of a weapon. It does not appear that the doctors who responded to the death scenes considered that perhaps Jack the Ripper simultaneously cut his victim's throat and pulled her backward to the ground. Investigators didn't seem to contemplate the possibility that the Ripper might have assiduously avoided being bloody in public by quickly getting out of his bloody clothes, coveralls, or gloves, and retreating to one of his hovels to clean up.
Sickert was afraid of diseases. He had a fetish about hygiene and was continually washing his hands. He would immediately wash his hair and face if he accidentally put on another person's hat. Sickert would have known about germs, infections, and diseases; he would have known that one didn't have to engage in oral, vaginal, or anal intercourse to contract them. Blood splashed into his face or transferred from his hands to his eyes or mouth or an open wound was enough to cause him a serious problem. Years later, he would go through a time of worry when he thought he had a sexually transmitted disease that turned out to be gout.
Chapter Twenty-one. A Great Joke
At 3:00 A.M., September 30th, Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long was patrolling Goulston Street in Whitechapel. H Division wasn't usually his beat, but he had been called in because jack the Ripper had just murdered two more women. Long walked past several dark buildings occupied by Jews, directing his bull's-eye lantern into the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. His bleary light shone into a foreboding passageway leading inside a building and illuminated a piece of dark-stained fabric on the ground. Written above it in white chalk on the black dado of the wall was
The Juwes are
The men That
Will not be Blamed
for nothing.
Long picked up the patch of fabric. It was a piece of apron wet with blood, and he immediately searched the staircases of 100-119. He would admit later at Catherine Eddows's inquest, "I did not make any enquiries of the tenements in the buildings. There were six or seven staircases. I searched every one; found no traces of blood or footmarks."
He should have checked all of the tenements. It is possible that whoever dropped the piece of apron might have been heading inside the building. The Ripper might live there. He might be hiding there. Long got out his notebook and copied down the chalk writing on the wall, and he rushed to the Commercial Street Police Station. It was important that he report what he had discovered, and he didn't have a partner with him. He may have been scared.
Police Constable Long had passed the same passageway on Goulston Street at 2:20 A.M., and he swore in court that the piece of apron wasn't there then. He would also testify at the inquest that he couldn't say that the chalk message on the wall was "very recently written." Perhaps the ethnic slur had been there for a while and it was simply a coincidence that the bit of bloody apron had been found right below it. The accepted and sensible point of view has always been that the Ripper wrote those bigoted words right after he murdered Catherine Eddows. It wouldn't make sense for a slur about Jews to have been left for many hours or days in the passageway of a building occupied by Jews.
The writing on the wall has continued to be the source of great controversy in the Ripper case. The message - presumably dashed off by the Ripper - was in a legible hand, and in the Metropolitan Police files at the Public Record Office, I found two versions of it. Long was fastidious. The copies he made in his notebook are almost identical, suggesting they may closely resemble what he saw in chalk. His facsimiles resemble Sickert's handwriting. The uppercase T's appear very similar to ones in the Ripper letter of September 25th. But it is treacherous - and worthless in court - to compare writing that is a "copy," no matter how carefully it was made.