A novelist at the scene of the crime
One great artist, Jackson Pollock, was indebted to the world of serial murder for his nickname: Jack the Dripper. So it would be a perfect neatness if the business of homicide could find a solution to one of its mysteries in the pantheon of great art. The super-selling American...
One great artist, Jackson Pollock, was indebted to the world of serial murder for his nickname: Jack the Dripper. So it would be a perfect neatness if the business of homicide could find a solution to one of its mysteries in the pantheon of great art.
The super-selling American crimewriter Patricia Cornwell has revealed on US television that she believes the Victorian painter Walter Sickert to have been Jack the Ripper. She has "staked my reputation" on the fact that, rather than hanging in the Tate, Sickert should have hung in Cut-Purse Lane.
This suggestion has already been the subject of at least two books in the last two decades - Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, and Sickert and the Ripper Crimes - but Cornwell, whose heroine is a forensic pathologist called Kay Scarpetta, is the first accuser to seek DNA evidence against her man.
With the millions she's made from Scarpetta, Cornwell bought up 32 Sickert originals and the table on which he painted. In the hope of finding a trace of DNA which might be compared with traces from letters sent by the Victorian killer to newspapers, she then tore one of the works of art apart: an act of desecration which may lead to her being remembered in history of art as Patricia the Ripper.
You might think that Sickert DNA could have been found less vandalously through the artist's descendants or his grave, but novelists are drawn to vivid scenes. However, when the trashing of the canvas revealed no genes, Cornwell fell back on an art history version of forensics: visual paralleling. The presence of a bed in one of his pictures seems to her uncannily similar to the cot where one of Jack's victims met her end. In this moment, Dr Kay Scarpetta meets Sir Ernst Gombrich. History indicates that Sickert spent much of the relevant time period in Dieppe, but it's unlikely that travel records are exact enough to fix his location at the times of the crimes.
Except for the cross-referencing of beds between art gallery and crime scene, Cornwell's main evidence is that examination of paintings and letters reveals "the hallmarks of a psychopath". This is a revealing departure in Sickert-Ripper studies. While previous books making allegations against the artist have suggested that he was coerced into murder - one volume posits a conspiracy to hide the birth of a bastard to the Duke Of Clarence - Cornwell argues that he did it for twisted pleasure.
What has happened here is that Cornwell, a gifted writer, has been seduced by the popular myth of the creative artist as headcase. This especially applies to painters. By coincidence, tonight sees the screening of a documentary about Munch (7.25pm, BBC2), an artist whose work and personality would have made him a prime suspect if the death rate had suddenly escalated in Oslo.
Perhaps because the brain is a visual processor, the idea that paint exposes the patterns of the mind has become very strong. If a freshly-stabbed corpse were ever discovered at a private view, you'd lock up the artists present first, followed by the gallery curators and then the critics. Child psychologists frequently take a keen interest in what the patient comes up with in art at school. Juvenile disciples of Munch or Bacon are likely to be prescribed the Ritalin pretty quickly. The oils and watercolour class is rumoured to be one of the more fully subscribed recreations in high-security prisons.
In fact, Sickert's work - particularly Ennui, his portrait of a stale marriage - indicates a pessimist more than a psychotic, although his contemporaries did complain that he favoured bleak and dingy studios, which might be marginally suspicious.
He was certainly not, however, the pale loner of police cliche, being celebrated as a wit and anecdotalist. Cornwell, however, still extends the stereotype of the crazy painter to him. Her claims appeared in the American media on the same day as another amateur sleuth, a Washington law professor, claimed to have proved through forensic re-examination that the Boston Strangler was not Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to the killings in the 1960s.
The professions of the people driving these re-examinations are revealing. It's in the nature of law professors to want closed cases reopened; it's in the nature of crime novelists to want open cases closed. These vocational motivations brought the law professor to DeSalvo, Cornwell to the Ripper. The essential difference between police fiction and police fact is their tolerance of open files. In the novel, someone has to be arrested and imprisoned, even if, in the more sophisticated examples of the genre, the reader may know it to be the wrong person. It is an irritating aspect of real-life crime - as the families of Rachel Nickell and Stephen Lawrence, among others, know - that the investigations may lack for years (sometimes forever) a neat ending.
While quite as compelling as her fiction, Patricia Cornwell's attempt to write a fictional last page for the Jack the Ripper case will always lack the authority of her novels. The likelihood is that we will now never know for certain the names behind those two most celebrated homicidal noms de plume: Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler. Great criminals differ from great artists in being able to leave no picture of themselves.
· comment@guardian.co.uk
The super-selling American crimewriter Patricia Cornwell has revealed on US television that she believes the Victorian painter Walter Sickert to have been Jack the Ripper. She has "staked my reputation" on the fact that, rather than hanging in the Tate, Sickert should have hung in Cut-Purse Lane.
This suggestion has already been the subject of at least two books in the last two decades - Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, and Sickert and the Ripper Crimes - but Cornwell, whose heroine is a forensic pathologist called Kay Scarpetta, is the first accuser to seek DNA evidence against her man.
With the millions she's made from Scarpetta, Cornwell bought up 32 Sickert originals and the table on which he painted. In the hope of finding a trace of DNA which might be compared with traces from letters sent by the Victorian killer to newspapers, she then tore one of the works of art apart: an act of desecration which may lead to her being remembered in history of art as Patricia the Ripper.
You might think that Sickert DNA could have been found less vandalously through the artist's descendants or his grave, but novelists are drawn to vivid scenes. However, when the trashing of the canvas revealed no genes, Cornwell fell back on an art history version of forensics: visual paralleling. The presence of a bed in one of his pictures seems to her uncannily similar to the cot where one of Jack's victims met her end. In this moment, Dr Kay Scarpetta meets Sir Ernst Gombrich. History indicates that Sickert spent much of the relevant time period in Dieppe, but it's unlikely that travel records are exact enough to fix his location at the times of the crimes.
Except for the cross-referencing of beds between art gallery and crime scene, Cornwell's main evidence is that examination of paintings and letters reveals "the hallmarks of a psychopath". This is a revealing departure in Sickert-Ripper studies. While previous books making allegations against the artist have suggested that he was coerced into murder - one volume posits a conspiracy to hide the birth of a bastard to the Duke Of Clarence - Cornwell argues that he did it for twisted pleasure.
What has happened here is that Cornwell, a gifted writer, has been seduced by the popular myth of the creative artist as headcase. This especially applies to painters. By coincidence, tonight sees the screening of a documentary about Munch (7.25pm, BBC2), an artist whose work and personality would have made him a prime suspect if the death rate had suddenly escalated in Oslo.
Perhaps because the brain is a visual processor, the idea that paint exposes the patterns of the mind has become very strong. If a freshly-stabbed corpse were ever discovered at a private view, you'd lock up the artists present first, followed by the gallery curators and then the critics. Child psychologists frequently take a keen interest in what the patient comes up with in art at school. Juvenile disciples of Munch or Bacon are likely to be prescribed the Ritalin pretty quickly. The oils and watercolour class is rumoured to be one of the more fully subscribed recreations in high-security prisons.
In fact, Sickert's work - particularly Ennui, his portrait of a stale marriage - indicates a pessimist more than a psychotic, although his contemporaries did complain that he favoured bleak and dingy studios, which might be marginally suspicious.
He was certainly not, however, the pale loner of police cliche, being celebrated as a wit and anecdotalist. Cornwell, however, still extends the stereotype of the crazy painter to him. Her claims appeared in the American media on the same day as another amateur sleuth, a Washington law professor, claimed to have proved through forensic re-examination that the Boston Strangler was not Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to the killings in the 1960s.
The professions of the people driving these re-examinations are revealing. It's in the nature of law professors to want closed cases reopened; it's in the nature of crime novelists to want open cases closed. These vocational motivations brought the law professor to DeSalvo, Cornwell to the Ripper. The essential difference between police fiction and police fact is their tolerance of open files. In the novel, someone has to be arrested and imprisoned, even if, in the more sophisticated examples of the genre, the reader may know it to be the wrong person. It is an irritating aspect of real-life crime - as the families of Rachel Nickell and Stephen Lawrence, among others, know - that the investigations may lack for years (sometimes forever) a neat ending.
While quite as compelling as her fiction, Patricia Cornwell's attempt to write a fictional last page for the Jack the Ripper case will always lack the authority of her novels. The likelihood is that we will now never know for certain the names behind those two most celebrated homicidal noms de plume: Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler. Great criminals differ from great artists in being able to leave no picture of themselves.
· comment@guardian.co.uk
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