Visitors to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool who look at the books on sale at the exhibition of Walter Sickert (1860–1942) might be forgiven for thinking that the painter’s greatest achievement was being named as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. Certainly, he was fascinated by the murder of a prostitute in Camden Town in 1907 (still known to aficionados of English murders as the Camden Town Murder), and he painted a room alleged to be the Ripper’s bedroom. But one might as well propose that Hilaire Belloc was Jack the Ripper because his sister, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, wrote by far the most convincing fictional account of the murderer and must have obtained her information from someone, her brother being easily to hand—unless she herself were the Ripper, of course.
Nevertheless, there is something dark—literally and figuratively so—about Sickert’s vision of the world, as if he saw the world through a glass darkly, or at any rate through dark glasses. He paints as if to depict anything in the full brightness of color were to be sentimental or unsophisticated. “I have seen into the essence of existence,” his paintings seem to say, “and it is very dark.” George Orwell once said that our civilization is founded upon coal; if so, its appearance for Sickert seems to have been dominated by soot, or at