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Review
‘[Sturgis] clearly has a profound sense of the paradoxes underlying the man and his work. Meticulous, heartfelt and thoroughly convincing.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘A truly comprehensive, grandsweep biography. Detailed, amusing and moving. Brilliantly done, an outstanding achievement. At last Sickert has the biography he deserves." Spectator
‘Excellent and authoritative, Sturgis's scholarship is exemplary.’ Guardian
‘A fine biography.’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
‘A biography that is as sure in its chronicling of artistic movements and trends as in its acute attention to the life of its subject.’ Financial Times
‘Magisterial, taut and fresh, it is a measure of how impressive Sickert's life, career and influence is that it feels more apt to argue that the artist has been fortunate in his biographer.’ Independent
Daily Mail
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Customer Reviews
Okay, the book is long, but on balance it has to be said that Sturgis has done well to condense Sickert's 82-year life into a mere 650 pages - given the source material and his subject's prodigious output he certainly could have written more...
In an ideal world, this book would reproduce a wider selection of Sickert's art. Taking the financial constraints of modern publishing and the availability of other illustrative volumes into account, however, this is a minor issue.
All in all, Sturgis should be commended for producing the first complete 'must read' biography on Walter Sickert. The audience for such a scholarly and insightful book is naturally smaller than it is for Patricia Cornwell's utterly inane 'Jack the Ripper: Case Closed' (more's the pity), but readers in any doubt should order the former - which perhaps requires a little more effort, but delivers a far deeper understanding of Sickert's colourful (and non-violent!) life.
Very impressive.
Matthew Sturgis inevitably refutes Cornwell's poor scholarship and misguided accusations, pointing out quite clearly why she was so seriously mistaken. Sickert emerges as a sexually active and promiscuous individual whose libido may have earned him a certain notoriety in polite, Victorian circles, but which nowhere even touches on the perversity and derangement of a serial killer.
Sickert was the son of an unremarkable artist who scraped a poor living with his painting. He, himself, was slow to blossom. Influenced by Whistler and Degas, for much of his life he was significant not for the work he produced, but for the people he knew. His talents don't bloom until he's into his thirties. He gets more interesting the older he becomes ... he seems to become his own artistic achievement, consciously painting images of himself which scandalise or arouse the attention of his social milieu.
Yet his art is worthy of study and admiration. He taken the ordinary, the everyday; he celebrates working women and working class life, helping democratise art and free it from the stuffy middle class salon image. Sickert exposes the exclusivity and pretensions of many of his contemporaries, and his work - often bleak, often with a 'noir' quality - is worthy of more attention than it has received in recent decades.
Overall, a fine, well-researched biography which will interest many because of the Ripper allegations. If there is one criticism, however, it is the length. Be advised, this is not light reading. It is, however, a narrative which will keep you absorbed.
I shall not argue for Walter Sickert's guilt with regard to the five canonical Jack the Ripper murders themselves. I shall demonstrate that he created Jack the Ripper.
After Annie Chapman's murder, the second in the sequence of five, the police received a letter signed Jack the Ripper. The letter taunted the police for ineptness and predicted that they would find more corpses. The police published the letter, hoping that someone would come forward and identify the writer. No one did.
Walter Sickert constantly toyed with his identity by changing his name and appearance. He produced name changes through aliases, variations on his name, and different combinations of his initials. Authors Patricia Cornwell and Matthew Sturgis disagree on whether Sickert was the Ripper killer. She convicts; he acquits. They do agree on Sickert's changes in name and appearance. The second most important instance of a name change is found on page 239 of Walter Sickert: A Life. Sturgis reproduces one of Sickert's signatures as W*lt*r S*ck*rt. He had removed the vowels. He certainly had the ability to build another name out of these vowels.
While contemplating Sickert's penchant for name changes, I turned over in my head Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper. The two names had the same ring. What accounted for this? I did the obvious thing and counted letters. Each name consisted of thirteen, but this numerical equivalence did not come close to explaining the eerie similarity. I had it. If you speak the names, they are rhythmically identical. A poet would observe that each contains four syllables forming two trochees. Was there more? Yes indeed. The same four vowels appear in the same order in Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper. Each vowel is bracketed by consonants, and all the vowels are short.
If the police catch an individual running out of a stranger's house at 3:00 AM carrying a television, then we have either a string of coincidences or a burglary. Either a string of coincidences connect the first Jack the Ripper letter to Walter Sickert, or he wrote and signed it. I vote for the latter.
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