Handy Dandy My Girlfriend Was Murdered Scrapbook
Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime
Lisa Tickner
The murder of a part-time prostitute in a bedroom in Camden Town caused a sensation in September 1907. Walter Sickert made a number of paintings and drawings that alluded to the killing. In this essay, first published in 2000, Lisa Tickner considers these works in the context of the murder and Sickert's practice.
It is said that we are a great literary nation but we really don't care about literature, we like films and we like a good murder. If there is not a murder about every day they put one in. They have put in every murder which has occurred during the past ten years again, even the Camden Town murder. Not that I am against that because I once painted a whole series about the Camden Town murder, and after all murder is as good a subject as any other.
Walter Sickert, lecture at Thanet School of Art, 19341
'The Camden Town Murder' is both the name of an event, christened in the newspapers, and the title of a painting – indeed the umbrella title for a series of images.2 What they have in common is a sifting of the formal and psychological possibilities available in the juxtaposition of a clothed man, with a naked woman on an iron bedstead, in a 'third floor back'. (Sickert sought these rooms out: where a friend saw only 'a forlorn hole, cold, cheerless', he saw 'the contre-jour lighting that he loved, stealing in through a small single window, clothing the poor place with light and shadow ... [and] four walls [that] spoke only of the silent shades of the past, watching us in the quiet dusk'.3) The exact boundaries of Sickert's series are rather fuzzy. First, because he used alternative titles for the same images and sometimes overlapping titles for different ones; and second, because there are at its margins peripheral works – like Dawn: Camden Town – which share the locality, the bedroom interiors and the sinister charge, but without any reference to murder in their titles.
In what follows I look first at the undisputed Camden Town Murder paintings; then at their referent (the murder as an event); then at their rather hybrid genre (at the question of how these are or are not 'nudes' in the context of prostitution and murder); and finally at death, as modern subject matter.
Camden Town Murder pictures
There are three main oils:
Summer Afternoon, or What shall we do for the Rent? (Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, Fife, c.1907–9; fig.1). There is a closely related but cropped version in a private collection and these seem to have been the paintings exhibited at the first exhibition of the Camden Town Group at the Carfax Gallery, London, in June 1911 as The Camden Town Murder Series No.1 and No.2;
The Camden Town Murder, or What shall we do about the Rent? (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, c.1908; fig.2); and
L'Affaire de Camden Town (exhibited in Paris and bought by Paul Signac in 1909; now in a private collection; fig.3).
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Summer Afternoon or What Shall We Do for the Rent? c.1907–9
Oil paint on canvas
515 x 410 mm
Fife Council Libraries & Museums: Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Antonia Reeve
Fig.1
Walter Richard Sickert
Summer Afternoon or What Shall We Do for the Rent? c.1907–9
Fife Council Libraries & Museums: Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Antonia Reeve
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do about the Rent? c.1908
Oil paint on canvas
256 x 356 mm
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund B1979.37.1
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Fig.2
Walter Richard Sickert
The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do about the Rent? c.1908
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund B1979.37.1
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
L'Affaire de Camden Town 1909
Oil paint on canvas
610 x 406 mm
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art
Fig.3
Walter Richard Sickert
L'Affaire de Camden Town 1909
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art
In what sense are these 'of' the Camden Town Murder? In no meaningful sense at all, according to two (related) positions, identifiable from about the time of their first exhibition until now. The first points out that Sickert's titles were often mischievous, misleading or irrelevant. In a probably apocryphal anecdote Frank Rutter suggested that The Camden Town Murder was later exhibited as Father Comes Home and finally found a purchaser as The Germans in Belgium; and Quentin Bell suggested that Sickert's titles were 'added haphazard for the sake of a private joke or the better bamboozlement of later historians'.4
The second position insists on the essentially pictorial value of modern painting. Whether or not pictures are acknowledged as rooted in the social world, that is not how they are best appreciated or understood. Roger Fry, reviewing Sickert in the Nation in 1911, ignored his titles and downplayed his subject matter. According to Fry, he is 'almost indifferent to what he paints, his care being altogether for the manner of it'; and he has 'steadily refused to acknowledge the effect upon the mind of the associated ideas of objects; he has considered solely their pictorial value as opposed to their ordinary emotional quality'.5
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Camden Town Nude: Conversation c.1908–9
Black chalk heightened with white, pen and ink on buff paper
337 x 235 mm
Royal College of Art, London
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Royal College of Art
Fig.4
Walter Richard Sickert
Camden Town Nude: Conversation c.1908–9
Royal College of Art, London
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Royal College of Art
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Study for 'L'Affaire de Camden Town' c.1909
Chalk on paper
355 x 229 mm
Private collection, Paris
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Fig.5
Walter Richard Sickert
Study for 'L'Affaire de Camden Town' c.1909
Private collection, Paris
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Something of this is true, of course. Paintings grow out of other paintings, out of the promise or failure of certain moves, as well as out of the social compost. The Camden Town Murder pictures have various precedents in Sickert's paintings of 1903–7 and, as Wendy Baron has pointed out, L'Affaire de Camden Town develops into a scene of brutal murder from 'the precise compositional springboard' of the two women in Camden Town Nude: Conversation c.1908–9 (fig.4).6
Fig.6
Drawings by Walter Sickert January 1911
V SICKER
Sickert was cavalier about titles. In 1910 he wrote:
Pictures, like streets and persons, have to have names to distinguish them. But their names are not definitions of them, or, indeed, anything but the loosest kind of labels that make it possible for us to handle them, that prevent us from mislaying them, or sending them to the wrong address.7
Anna Robins has published pages from the catalogues for the Carfax Gallery exhibitions of 1911 and 1912 (fig.6).8 The copies in the Tate Gallery Library are annotated with comments and sketches, and from these it emerges that the drawing of a clothed man in conversation with a naked woman on a bed, etched as The Camden Town Murder, was exhibited as A Consultation; La Belle Gâtée or The Camden Town Murder as Persuasion (fig.7); and The Camden Town Murder or What shall we do for the Rent? as Consolation (fig.8). In each case the resonance of the image shifts with the title. We might consider that the titles of the drawings fix the meanings of the paintings – that we should read the ambiguities of The Camden Town Murder, for example, by reference to an idea of 'consolation' rather than violence. It anchors the image in a different way. But there is no evidence that the titles of the drawings are earlier or more apposite, since both drawings and paintings were produced two to three years earlier. They were more likely titled for the purpose of exhibiting them separately in January 1911, and in advance of the first public exhibition of the Murder paintings in Britain that June.9
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Persuasion (previously known as The Camden Town Murder, or La Belle Gâtée) c.1908
Chalk on paper
267 x 222 mm
Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
Fig.7
Walter Richard Sickert
Persuasion (previously known as The Camden Town Murder, or La Belle Gâtée) c.1908
Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Photo © Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Study for 'The Camden Town Murder' c.1908
Chalk on paper
235 x 375 mm
Private collection, USA
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Fig.8
Walter Richard Sickert
Study for 'The Camden Town Murder' c.1908
Private collection, USA
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour 1907
Oil paint on canvas
508 x 611 mm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 0.1977. A.R. Ragless Bequest Fund 1963
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert/DACS 2011
Photo © Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Fig.9
Walter Richard Sickert
Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour 1907
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 0.1977. A.R. Ragless Bequest Fund 1963
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert/DACS 2011
Photo © Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
The fact that the titles were (re)used for different purposes does not mean that they did not mean anything – to Sickert, in terms of resources and motivation; to contemporaries, who took them as meaningful reference points (expecting a picture called The Camden Town Murder to have something to do with a murder in Camden Town); or to us.10 Titles do more than designate works (to 'prevent us from mislaying them'11). They frame them. They cue the audience in particular ways. They may be flatly generic or descriptive (Still Life, The Retreat from Moscow); or they may allude to the formal properties of the work (Symphony in White, Nocturne in Black and Gold). This was Whistler's innovation in the 1860s; it was intended to signal his painterly ambitions and direct the viewer to the formal properties of the work. (Sickert hated Whistler's titles, complaining that he cried out in them 'for the qualities he failed to get within the rectangle of his frames. The catalogues are full of "gold" and "silver", of "amethyst" and "opal".'12) Where Whistler's titles rule out narrative, Sickert's invite it. Of course Hilton Kramer is right to insist that as 'literature' the Camden Town paintings 'are not very informative on the basis of the painted marks on the canvas – which is to say, from what we actually see with our own eyes'; and that if we compare L'Affaire de Camden Town 1909 with Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour 1907 (fig.9), in the broken and impasted touch, the use of light, the claustrophobic intimism, 'there is no significant difference between them as paintings'.13 But this is to overlook what Sickert's audience knew, and how Sickert prompted them. A title sets a process of interpretation inexorably in train, and Sickert plays with the gap between what we see and what we are told.14 As Lou Klepac first pointed out, his titles should be compared with captions in Punch (or music hall refrains, or newspaper headlines); they 'create an atmosphere in which the subject of the painting becomes a climactic moment (or a flat one) of a story at which we need to guess'.15
This sense of a narrative runs against the grain of what has come to be construed as 'modern' in modern art. But Sickert insisted that 'All the great draughtsmen tell a story'.16 He maintained that no country could have a great school of painting when the unfortunate artist was confined 'to the choice between the noble site as displayed in the picture-postcard, or the quite nice young person, in what Henry James has called a wilderness of chintz'.17 He was a self-proclaimed realist and literary painter with an interest in narrative and an obsession with facture. (He called it 'the cooking side of painting'.18) He did not believe in severing subject and treatment:
Is it not possible that this antithesis is meaningless, and that the two things are one, and that an idea does not exist apart from its exact expression? ... The real subject of a picture or a drawing ... and all the world of pathos, of poetry, of sentiment that it succeeds in conveying, is conveyed by means of the plastic facts expressed ... If the subject of a picture could be stated in words there had been no need to paint it.19
It is in this sense – rather than in any quibbling as to the recorded details of Emily Dimmock's murder in 1907 – that Sickert's paintings are not illustrations. They cannot be decanted into words. And they do not use the available 'language' of illustration for sensational events, evident in the depictions of the Camden Town Murder in such publications as the Illustrated Police Budget and News.20 But their subject matters. This seeps through even in Fry's review, when, having stressed the detachment of Sickert's vision and the essentially pictorial nature of his ambition – things are 'not symbols' for Sickert and 'contain no key to unlock the secrets of the heart and spirit' – Fry grudgingly acknowledged his 'persistent devotion to the banal and trivial situations of ordinary life, at times even an attraction for what is squalid'.21
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
La Hollandaise c.1906
Oil paint on canvas
support: 511 x 406 mm; frame: 722 x 630 x 104 mm
Tate T03548
Purchased 1983
© Tate
Fig.10
Walter Richard Sickert
La Hollandaise c.1906
Tate T03548
© Tate
Exhibiting murder paintings at the Camden Town Group's début exhibition in 1911 had a manifesto implication. The Daily Telegraph wondered 'at his choice of subjects more worthy of the "Police News" than a picture gallery of high rank',22 and the Commentator queried a name which 'honoured a part of London that one more naturally associates with murders than with art'.23 From the first the critics were divided as to whether the 'sordid' nature of Sickert's subject matter was redeemable either by the way it was painted, or by seeing it as a new pictorial equivalent to such literary precedents as Flaubert or Maupassant.24 We can see it as both. The surface of The Camden Town Murder is a mass of marks and squiggles resisting easy resolution. Our reading of spatial recession is made in the teeth of its superimposed planes, its advancing wallpaper (with a final rococo fillip in the woman's hair) and the ambiguities of the man's knees in relation to the draperies and the woman's hand and wrist. (John Rothenstein thought it was simply a bad painting.25) In L'Affaire de Camden Town we struggle to resolve the violently foreshortened bed and body with the dramatic diapering of the wall, just as we struggle to resolve the anecdotal elements of the composition – the discarded clothes, the shirtsleeves, the chamber pot, that particularly insistent wallpaper – with the making of the woman's pubis the fulcrum of the composition and her vulnerable and naked body the field of the man's gaze (and ours).26 Marjorie Lilly recalled a related drawing in which 'the terror conjured up by a few taut lines' reminded her of David's sketch of Marie Antoinette in the tumbril on its way to the guillotine.27 In works like La Hollandaise (Tate T03548, fig.10), the slashing strokes of the brush, conjuring limbs and torso into being but seeming to cut across and erase the features above them, already imply a kind of violence to the figure they represent.28 Perhaps it was partly this tension between a self-consciously modernist foregrounding of facture and an equally self-conscious topicality in his subject matter that grated on more conservative critics. Either alone might have been redeemed by the other and frequently was. Fin-de-siècle painting is full of fallen and dying women, smoothly painted and aesthetically disposed.29 Bonnard and Vuillard (whom Sickert admired) excelled at these painterly, decorative interiors but as settings for impeccably bourgeois subject matter.30 With Sickert the sense of menace and sexual vulnerability is there in the fabric of the picture itself. But the title secures it, and Sickert chose the title. His paintings were in some sense fuelled by the murder (it wasn't just a peg). Nor was the Camden Town Murder a nine days' wonder as Lilian Browse suggested.31 It was constantly present in the newspapers for more than three months. Forgotten now, in 1936 it could still be described as 'the classic British crime of this century'.32
The referent
In the early hours of 12 September 1907 Emily Dimmock, an attractive, twenty-two-year-old blonde prostitute, was murdered in her bed in Camden Town.33 Her naked body was discovered later that morning by her common-law husband, Bertram Shaw, who returned from his night-shift in the restaurant car of the Sheffield Express at half past eleven. Dimmock lay slightly on her left side, with her left arm pulled awkwardly behind her, her right hand on the pillow, and the sheet drawn up over her naked body. The front of her hair was in curling pins. Her throat was cut from ear to ear, severing her head almost completely from her body.34 Blood had soaked into the sheets and on to the floor below. The remains of a supper eaten by two people lay on the table. There was a basin on the washstand full of bloody water with one of the victim's flannel petticoats, which the murderer had used to clean his hands.
The St Pancras Chronicle reported the story on 13 September – 'Camden Town Tragedy. Woman Hacked to Death. Mysterious Crime' – noting in its next issue that the tragedy was already 'the main topic of newspaper gossip and chatter'.35 Crowds gathered at the coroner's and magistrates' courts and thousands lined the route of Emily Dimmock's funeral cortège to St Pancras Cemetery. The drama of the trial was heightened by the shadow of the gallows, by the fact that the defendant for the first time in a murder trial gave evidence on his own behalf, and by the brilliant performance of Sir Edward Marshall Hall in his defence. The Penny Illustrated Paper called it 'the most remarkable criminal trial held within the past fifty years'.36 The public gallery was packed and distinguished visitors including Hall Caine, Arthur Pinero, Henry Irving and George Sims were admitted by ticket. When the verdict was due on 18 December between seven and ten thousand people thronged the Old Bailey exits and stretched into Ludgate Circus. Traffic was at a standstill and when the news of Robert Wood's acquittal was finally flashed down the wires, theatrical performances were interrupted to announce it.37
This level of public attention was sustained by several factors. First there was the morbid fascination of sex and death. But more specifically, there was the inevitable incitement and framing of this fascination provided by both nineteenth-century fictional genres like the detective story, and by the prominence of sex and crime in the popular press (in the News of the World, for instance, and in the Police Illustrated News, the Penny Illustrated Paper and the Illustrated Police Budget). David Napley remarked perhaps too casually that: 'Each succeeding day of the murder trial unfolded to the public a story as enthralling as any novel, as dramatic as any play and as intriguing and mystifying as any detective story'.38 It did so not just because the trial was 'like' these literary forms or as dramatic in its effects, but because crime and punishment (and prostitution) were the great themes of nineteenth-century literary realism and the detective story one of the most widespread genres in popular fiction. Sex, sport and crime were the staples of the popular press, as they still are and as they had been for the hawkers of nineteenth-century broadsheets.39 Newspapers offered an unfolding narrative of the search for truth – the truth of Emily Dimmock's days and end, the reasons for her fall into 'an irregular life' as one of 'the lowest class of unfortunates',40 the identity of her murderer and his motives – so that each day, each week, brought new instalments, new evidence, new hypotheses, a shifting of the ground that promised to settle into some new and finally satisfying pattern of comprehensible cause and effect.
Joseph Simpson 1879–1939
Robert Wood
Reproduced in Basil Hogarth (ed.), Trial of Robert Wood (The Camden Town Case), William Hodge, London and Edinburgh 1936
Fig.11
Joseph Simpson
Robert Wood
Reproduced in Basil Hogarth (ed.), Trial of Robert Wood (The Camden Town Case), William Hodge, London and Edinburgh 1936
Sickert had spent the summer of 1907 working on a series of interiors in his rooms at 6 Mornington Crescent. Every alternate day he worked from the model, as yet untroubled and alone on her iron bedstead, the dusty sunlight filtering past the dressing-table mirror in contre-jour effect behind.41 Probably he was in France by the time of the murder in September, but he was an avid reader of newspapers and sought out the English papers abroad.42 It must have struck him that he had been painting a nude model in a Camden Town bedsitter little more than a mile from Emily Dimmock's lodgings; that her public house haunts and trips to music halls were all in his neighbourhood; that the man arrested for her murder was a commercial artist; and that this man's girlfriend Ruby Young, a prostitute, described herself euphemistically as 'an artist's model'. Sickert himself seems to have been responsible for the oral tradition according to which Wood, acquitted of her murder, had posed for his paintings, producing as it were an indexical link between murder and canvases.43 Though often repeated, this story is wrong. The figure in the paintings is burlier, with sideburns and perhaps a moustache. He lacks Wood's aquiline features and the 'blue serge suit' and 'shabby genteel appearance' of police descriptions (fig.11).44 His profile in La Belle Gâtée is reminiscent of the kind of features that Cesare Lombroso, the criminal anthropologist, classed as deviant and degenerate (though Sickert dismissed Lombroso as 'only a high class and extremely entertaining Mr Gribble'45). It is tempting to link him to an undated letter from Ethel Sands, which mentions an invitation to draw in Sickert's studio, where he had hired a prize-fighter to pose with a model across his lap.46
Walter Richard Sickert with his Head Shaved c.1920
Photograph, black and white, on paper (photographer unknown)
149 x 110 mm
Inscribed in an unknown hand 'Photo of Sickert, he shaved his head' on back
Tate Archive TGA 8120/2/3
Fig.12
Walter Richard Sickert with his Head Shaved c.1920
Tate Archive TGA 8120/2/3
There was another story grinning through the paint of the Camden Town Murder: the story of Jack the Ripper, recalled in the Illustrated Police Budget at just this moment as that 'unparalleled fiend whom by his warfare against women of a certain class, reduced the East End of London to a state of terror and of siege'.47 Dimmock's murder, though apparently motiveless, was not like those of the Ripper's victims in the autumn of 1888: this was not a serial murder, the body was not sexually mutilated or displayed, the murderer did not court publicity or send taunting messages to the police.48 Nor was Camden Town, at least not like Whitechapel, an area of slums, poverty, sweated workshops, petty crime and racial tension. It was a comparatively convivial locale of tenanted housing, local industries, pubs and music halls. 'What shall we do for the rent?' was a music hall refrain. But Sickert's alternative titles – The Camden Town Murder and What shall we do for the Rent? – are not incompatible with each other or with the echoes of Whitechapel. As Richard Shone and Wendy Baron have pointed out, casual prostitution was a last resort for the rent.49 The last words of Polly Nicholls, the Ripper's first victim, were addressed to her lodging housekeeper. She said he should keep her place: 'I shan't be long getting my bed money, look at my smart bonnet'. (She was drawn saying this in the Police Illustrated News of 12 October 1888.50)
Nevertheless the brutal and apparently inexplicable murder of a young prostitute now carried the shadow of sex-crime with it. Marshall Hall's opening speech for the defence asked if it was credible that a man with Wood's excellent character would go to Dimmock's house, murder her, wait until five o'clock in the morning and then return to work calm and collected:
Is it not much more probable that the crime is the work of a sexual maniac – a murder similar to the murders which paralysed all London many years ago? Is it not possible that this woman, who had descended to the lowest depths of prostitution, should have become acquainted with some man who proved to be a maniac seeking for his prey?51
Sickert was already fascinated by Jack the Ripper. Osbert Sitwell recalled that his talk contained 'certain invariable strands, certain immutable monuments' – chief among them the Tichborne Claimant and Jack Ripper.52 Marjorie Lilly knew him when he worked on the Murder paintings and also noted this obsession with 'crime personified by Jack the Ripper'. She described his studio in Fitzroy Street, known as the 'Frith' (because William Powell Frith had painted there), as 'a huge, bare, carpetless barn engulfed in shadows, thick with dust and the odour of paint and cigars', with by the door an iron bedstead, a hanging bookcase and a honeycomb quilt. With these he constructed his mis-en-scène. (Sickert had started out as an actor and was not above thinking himself into the part.) There was 'a red Bill Sykes handkerchief dangling from the bedpost' which she called 'a lifeline to guide the train of his thought'.
Sickert was working now on one of his Camden Town murders and while he was reliving the scene he would assume the part of a ruffian, knotting the handkerchief loosely round his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern. Immobile, sunk deep in his chair, lost in the long shadows of that vast room, he would meditate for hours on his problem.53
The handkerchief 'played a necessary part in the performance of the drawings, spurring him on at crucial moments, becoming so interwoven with the actual working out of his idea that he kept it constantly before his eyes'.54 (Even the landlady respected the handkerchief and left it alone when she came in to clean.) In effect, Lilly conflated the Camden Town Murder paintings with Sickert's interest in Jack the Ripper, suggesting that if the event of 1907 was the immediate spur to these unprecedented paintings, what lay behind and had now merged with them was the 'autumn of terror' of 1888. Or perhaps they were not unprecedented: Sickert told Keith Baynes that he had painted a picture of Jack the Ripper in 1906, but nothing survives.55
Despite various precedents the Ripper had become – with the expansion of the daily press and the popularising of an emergent sexology – the founding father of modern sex-crime.56 His crimes were random, serial and apparently motiveless. Signing himself 'Jack the Ripper', he described himself to the press as 'down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them up until I get buckled'.57 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathetic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study in 1885, added him to a new edition as 'case 17' in the section on sadistic crimes and lust murders.58 He was 'a new gynocidal archetype'.59 As the Southern Guardian put it: 'We are face to face with some mysterious and awful product of modern civilisation'.60 The question for Sickert is then that of sexual- or lust-murder as a modern subject in modern art.
Acknowledging that Sickert's paintings are not illustrations of the event, one might nevertheless compare them with descriptions and images that are or claim to be. This helps throw into relief the kinds of pictorial choices that Sickert made, and reconstitutes something of the 'noise' of urban reportage, audible in popular memory, against which they figured, as in the double-page spreads from the Illustrated Police News and the Illustrated Police Budget (figs.13 and 14). 61
Ghastly Tragedy in Camden Town 21 September 1907 Illustrated Police News
British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Photo © British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Fig.13
Ghastly Tragedy in Camden Town 21 September 1907 Illustrated Police News
British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Photo © British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Discovery of the Camden Town Horror! 21 September 1907 Illustrated Police Budget
British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Photo © British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Fig.14
Discovery of the Camden Town Horror! 21 September 1907 Illustrated Police Budget
British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Photo © British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Those anonymous artists were unlikely to have visited the scene of the crime, were not yet privy to details that emerged at the inquest, and were not hired to produce a pictorial report. They filled a general structure – the violent and sexual death of a beautiful woman – with local content.62 This is gothick, melodramatic representation in broadsheet style. It is drawn for an audience, as it would be acted on stage. (It is the second act: what life led up to this has to be determined retrospectively, and the dénouement – the solution to the mystery and the bringing to justice of the murderer – is yet to come.)
Both illustrations use the standard formula of a double-page spread combining the dramatic moment – the discovery of the body – with appended vignettes. Both stage the same scene from the same viewpoint. A bloody and partially naked body is sprawled on a double bed (brass and iron: more elaborate than Sickert's). In fact if the body is isolated from its immediate context – from the horrified expressions of Shaw and his landlady and the caption beneath – it is the blood that transforms a pompier pose of sexual abandon into the image of a brutal assault.63
Images like these are a curious blend of the circumstantial detail of reportage and the Victorian narrative tradition, with the essentially dramatic codes of Baroque and neoclassical history painting. They throw into relief the nature of Sickert's refusals: instead of the set tableaux, the keyhole view; instead of the dramatic moments of death or discovery, a silent, sinister but ambiguous communion; instead of the anecdotal details, an almost claustrophobic insistence on the figures and the bed; instead of the sprawling, prurient, blood-spattered nudes, a sense of anonymous, shockingly explicit, middle-aged flesh.
And yet simultaneously Sickert was fighting a rearguard action against the rejection of narrative in modern painting. Narrative had been central both to the 'elevated' traditions of academic history painting and the popular forms of domestic genre, but towards the turn of the nineteenth century 'advanced' artists began to stress pictorial elements at the expense of an explicit engagement with narrative and subject matter. Sickert believed that the narrative tradition was far from exhausted. He denounced 'the Whistlerian anti-literary theory of drawing', insisting, 'All the greater draughtsmen tell a story'.64 In 1912, against a gathering tide of critical opinion, he maintained: 'the whole field of natural "genre" pictures, desolated by the error of scale introduced by competitive exhibitions, is waiting to be re-tilled on the lines, say, of Hogarth, of Wilkie, of Longhi'.65
The period of Whistler's eminence was also the great period of illustrated journalism. Sickert's father and brother were illustrators and he had been one himself.66 Asking, rhetorically, who was the greatest English artist of the nineteenth century, Sickert – who might have named Constable, Turner, Whistler or Rossetti – proposed that 'it would be difficult even to find a candidate to set against Charles Keene, a draughtsman on a, then, threepenny paper'.67 The Camden Town paintings are indebted to this graphic tradition, and to Victorian 'realists' like Herkomer and Fildes. But they also owe something to the Edwardian 'problem picture', another popular narrative genre, and its sudden demise around 1908.
The problem picture, as Pamela Fletcher has pointed out, was 'one of the most anticipated and publicised features of the late Victorian and Edwardian Royal Academy'.68 These were paintings that offered morally and narratively ambiguous scenes of contemporary life, open to a range of interpretations and solutions. Viewers responded with enthusiasm in newspaper competitions and in letters to the artists and the press. In the process of completing and explaining the paintings they invented their own narratives and 'grappled with the new social terrain of the early twentieth century, in particular the changing roles available for modern women'. Fletcher argues that 'the Edwardian "problem picture" was one attempt to utilize the indeterminacy inherent in narrative to create a socially engaged form of public art', but that the attempt failed, as the opposition between 'the narrative' and 'the modern', set in place by artists and critics, was increasingly absorbed as common sense. The subject matter was contemporary; but its exploration through narrative came to seem increasingly old-fashioned – illustrative and moralising – rather than modern.
John Collier 1850–1934
Sentence of Death 1908
Oil paint on canvas
1295 x 1626 mm
Wolverhampton City Art Gallery
Photo © Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage
Fig.15
John Collier
Sentence of Death 1908
Wolverhampton City Art Gallery
Photo © Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage
John Collier was an artist who had made his reputation as a painter of popular and successful problem pictures like The Prodigal Daughter 1903, The Cheat 1905 and Mariage de Convenance 1907. His Academy exhibit of 1908, Sentence of Death (fig.15), was 'simultaneously the last to be taken seriously and the first to be the subject of overwhelming negative commentary'. Fletcher offers three main reasons for this. First, it features a man and his doctor where viewers expected to see a 'fallen woman': as one critic complained there was no 'Wicked Aristocracy ... no study of gambling or marrying for money, no flashing eyes and yellow satin dresses'. Second, the doctor's opinion is no longer ambiguous – this is a terminal illness – and no clear social or moral question is posed: the image fails to maintain the right level of indeterminacy, being too banal, or too obscure, for useful debate.69 But lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, Fletcher points out that critics repeatedly dismissed the picture, not just as 'too literary', but as too much like an advertisement. Between 1880 and 1920 newspaper and magazine advertising became increasingly pictorial, borrowing from the visual conventions of narrative painting until the problem picture and the advertisement came to look more and more the same. They were both modern life subjects, they both required a certain active engagement from the 'decoding' viewer, and their final meanings were left indeterminate; but the advertisement offered its product as the solution to the problem, while stimulating that unfocused desire on which mass commodification turns. Problem pictures came to seem both too literary and too commercial (too hysterical and too suburban), and 'after 1908 were no longer taken seriously in art reviews, but discussed in gossip columns and Society magazine editorials as suitable only for the fashionable female viewer'.
Sickert did not so much paint a narrative as borrow one off the peg in the newspapers. He directed his viewers to a particular event but did not quite picture it. The event itself remained mysterious. Why did Emily Dimmock resume her 'irregular life'? Why did a respectable man consort with prostitutes? Who was the murderer? What was the motive?70 But the questions, though hotly debated, did not add up to the public discussion of a general issue – prostitution, sexual violence, masculinity – in a way that could ground the terms for a 'problem' picture. This in a way was Sickert's point. He was not concerned with middle class wives or prodigal daughters in the Collier mould. Dimmock was not a 'fallen woman'. She had no social and moral status from which to fall. This was her job, not her disgrace. And because of her class, though there is ambiguity, there is no moral conundrum here of the kind required to provide the kernel for a problem picture (and its very particular relations with its audience).
Sickert produced a decipherable image but not a readable event. This has to do with his handling of narrative and his handling of paint. No artist can paint, except sequentially, the passage of time – the movement from stasis, to action, to (a modified) stasis that makes up the basic structure of narrative. The usual solution is to focus on the action and weave in hints of a 'before' and an 'after'. Sickert's milieu is electric with violence but nothing is happening. He paints the stasis before or after; it is not clear which. Form is conjured and cancelled at once in the flickering web of his painterly hatchings and crusty facture; features, gestures, setting, accessories are buried or blurred. The scribbled and crumbly impasto insists in the modernist fashion on its presence as paint. Dragged, stiff-bristled strokes produce a flecked, animated, tactile surface. And yet the painting holds on to narrative. The medium is not at odds with the subject but invades and extends it: against Sargent's 'wriggle and chiffon' the 'gross material facts' of pigment come to stand in for the 'gross materiality of working class urban space'.71 There is a novel and covert beauty here; what Sickert himself called 'attar of roses wrung from flint'.72 But he built through his title, his subject, his model and his handling the ultimate riposte to Whistlerian elegance: to Symphony in White, to taste as 'the death of a painter', to the received category of the 'aesthetic' ('for me it's the rudest word I know').73
Pamela Fletcher argues that viewers learned to dismiss the 'problem picture' as it was overtaken by advertising, and as painterly ambitions shifted to 'significant form'. They learned to distinguish between commerce and culture, the 'narrative' and the 'modern'. In the process the audience divided, between those who were knowledgeable about art and those who were not ('the so-called "shilling public" of "suburban" women'). Knowledgeable viewers split their responses to different kinds of visual imagery and 'learned to aspire to a private and imaginative aesthetic experience rather than a public and social conversation in front of a work of art'. Sickert was loath to make this choice. When he urged Virginia Woolf that he had 'always been a literary painter, like all decent painters, do be the first to say so', this was not a cynical feint, but an expression of his social ambitions for art.74 Virginia Woolf, finding herself out of kilter with Bloomsbury aesthetics, turned to her nephew Quentin Bell: 'Do you think one could treat his paintings like novels? ... What do you think of Sickert's painting? I gather Roger is rather down on it; so is Clive. It seems to me all that painting ought to be. Am I wrong? if so, why?'75
Genre: The nude, the prostitute, the murder victim
The Camden Town Murder paintings could be imagined as occupying the overlapping area of three circles in a Venn diagram (fig.16). One is labelled 'the nude' (e.g. Cabanel's Venus); one the 'prostitute' (e.g. Degas's Women on the Terrace of a Café) and one 'murder' (e.g. Daumier's Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1834 or Cézanne's The Murder). The conflation of 'nude' and 'prostitute' would be most securely represented by Manet's Olympia (fig.17). As T.J. Clark has put it, Olympia 'altered and played with identities the culture wished to keep still, pre-eminently those of the nude and the prostitute'.76 R.H. Wilenski, a critic defending Sickert from the charge of gratuitously 'sordid' subject matter, insisted that The Camden Town Murder was 'just a technical experiment by Sickert who thought it would be fun to take Manet's Olympia and paint it the other way round'.77 I shall take this comment seriously as a way into the discussion of the Camden Town Murder paintings as 'nudes'.
Edouard Manet 1832–1883
Olympia 1863
Oil paint on canvas
1300 x 1900 mm
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Photo © Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Fig.17
Edouard Manet
Olympia 1863
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Photo © Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
First, the nude. Sickert, who published an article on 'The naked and the Nude' in 1910, held all the conventional realist objections to the Salon nude as the representative of 'an intellectual and artistic bankruptcy'. In his view it was no better, and more pretentious, than tableaux vivants in the contemporary music hall. '"The Wave" is an unvarying item. Clad in pink tricot from the neck downwards ... a somewhat stiff little packet, like a second-hand lay figure of the cheapest make, floats, not without a strand of gauze, on the crest of the property billow ... The audience, nourished for generations on the Academy and Chantrey Bequest nudes, respond[s] with enthusiasm, convinced that here [is] Art without what the papers call "vulgarity".' The Salon nude was prurient, vacuous, and quite unconnected to everyday life. Conglomerations of nudes were 'not only repellent, but slightly absurd'. Ingres's Turkish Bath was like 'a dish of macaroni, something wriggling and distasteful'.78 It was a fault of art school teaching (and particularly of the art school nude) that while a picture 'generally represents someone, somewhere' students are 'made to begin with the study of the someone, generally nowhere'. There is in consequence 'a certain monotony in their representation of women, aesthetically garbed and yearning unutterably, even when they yearn in groups of three at a time'.79 So Sickert's models make no pretence to yearn. They belong to what he called in another context 'his own particular brand of frump'.80 Like Degas's nudes, they are not 'aesthetically' proportioned or posed. They are not woodland nymphs or classical Venuses or harem odalisques. Sickert sought 'the sensation of a page torn from the book of life'81 and reviewers compared him with Conrad and Flaubert just as George Sims referred to the Camden Town Murder as 'a Zolaesque story of London life'.82 But this is in the end not a page from the novelists (from Balzac or Dickens, whom he loved) or from Mayhew, Booth, Sims and the Victorian philanthropists and social explorers, but from the newspapers. Sickert's hypothetical model 'Tilly Pullen' is stripped of her lendings and leaves the studio to 'climb the first dirty little staircase in the first shabby little house' where the artist follows her 'into the kitchen, or, better still ... into her bedroom'. Only then does she become 'the stuff of which the Parthenon was made, or Durer, or any Rembrandt ... a Degas or Renoir, and stuff for the draughtsman'.83 A 'gleam of light and warmth and life'84 was what Sickert said the nude should provide, but when we get to the leaden flesh of the Murder paintings, that light is extinguished, and the hysterical charge of the wallpaper is like mounting background music to the fatal dénouement of a commercial transaction. These images are in fact quite noir, not just because of their narrative reference but because of the implicit sadism of their staging of female sexuality.85
Second, prostitution. The prostitute was a central figure in nineteenth-century art and literature: a standard solution to the problem of modernising the realist nude, and a standard trope in which to embody the alienation, specularisation and commodification of the modern city.86 The rigidity of the ideological distinction between 'respectable' and 'fallen' women, and the moral scapegoating of the prostitute as a sexual deviant, provided the prostitute with a particular narrative trajectory in art and literature. This was true in Victorian narrative painting and among artists of the Second Empire in France, and it was as much the case with Flaubert, Baudelaire, Courbet and Manet as it was with Salon artists and in popular literature. In France, Baudelaire wrote of 'all the various types of fallen womanhood' in 'that vast picture-gallery which is life in London or Paris', on a descending scale from the gilded courtesans to 'the poor slaves of those filthy stews'.87 In Britain, paintings like G.F. Watts's Found Drowned and Augustus Egg's Past and Present invoked a passage from rural or wifely innocence to seduction, betrayal, prostitution, poverty and suicide by drowning. This was the standard narrative of political, legislative, medical and reforming discourses on immorality. The only difference in the case of art, as Lynda Nead has pointed out, was that aesthetic requirements might modify the expectation that the ravages of the deviant life be clearly legible on the deviant body.88
All the evidence suggests that this was wrong: that is, that the standard narrative of the prostitute's decline had little to do with the social reality of prostitution and a great deal to do with the conviction that the wages of sin must be death.89 Women's entry into prostitution was apparently voluntary, gradual and not necessarily permanent. The social profile of the prostitute was unskilled, poor working class, with local origins but displaced family relations (like Emily Dimmock, the youngest of fifteen children, who started her working life in a straw-hat factory in Bedford). Prostitution offered a temporary solution to pressing problems – like what to do for the rent – and limited social and economic independence. Many women moved on or married out of it. Emily Dimmock, who was young, attractive, sociable and settled with Bertram Shaw, might have done so too. But she fell victim to a sex-murderer. After the impact of the Ripper crimes in 1888 this was the new narrative ending for the prostitute's life. Jack the Ripper switched the rails, as it were, from an imaginary trajectory that ended in shame, disease, poverty and a watery suicide to one that ended in bloody violence, in 'retribution' at the hands of a pervert, 'down on whores' who wouldn't 'quit ripping them' until he was 'buckled'. No one had painted this yet. It was a new subject, and it was to become, alas, one of the principal sexual narratives of the twentieth century.
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Study for 'L'Affaire de Camden Town' c.1909
Chalk on paper
268 x 213 mm
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Fig.18
Walter Richard Sickert
Study for 'L'Affaire de Camden Town' c.1909
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
How was it to be pictured? There is something astute about Wilenski's comment that this is Olympia from the other side. In The Camden Town Murder, granted a considerable discrepancy of scale, there are the same horizontal planes, the same reclining nude set against a clothed and more vertical foil. But instead of the challenging stare there is an averted and perhaps sightless gaze; instead of the tensed but pearly nude, in Wendy Baron's phrase, the 'leg o'mutton' corpse;90 instead of the maid on the right, the perpetrator (?) on the left; instead of a panoply of accessories insisting on, multiplying and fetishising Olympia's status as sexual commodity – the cashmere shawl, the slippers, the flowers, the Baudelairean cat – nothing but the figures, the wallpaper and the briskly scrubbed and dashed handling of the surface itself. 'The other side' is both spatial and temporal. The viewer is on the other side of the bed and at the dead end of the sexual exchange. This is the nude – and the victims in the Illustrated Police News and Budget are still recognisably nudes – turned corruptible flesh. This is the underside, the abject, the 'gleam of warmth and light and life' run into the ground; not the bounded body of the classic nude, a matter of form and contour, but the body with orifices, the body that leaks and dies. In L'Affaire de Camden Town the chamber pot secures it (fig.18). (Perhaps that is why one of the cartoons of Olympia includes a chamber pot.91) It has been slightly shifted from the drawing and now a single diagonal links it to the vaginal 'slit' and runs on through the torso and up the diapering in the wallpaper. It is a punishing de-fetishising of the Academy nude.
It is perhaps worth noting two things at this point. First, that Sickert was very well acquainted with the French art world; he was in other paintings (like Cocotte de Soho) indebted to Manet and he certainly knew Olympia.92 Second, that Olympia, which had caused such a scandal in 1865, had become something of an old master by the time it entered the Louvre from the Luxembourg and was hung next to Ingres's La Grande Odalisque in 1907. Proust's Oriane de Guermantes remarks: 'The other day ... at the Louvre, we came across Manet's Olympia. Nobody is astonished by it any more. It looks like something by Ingres! And yet heaven knows I've broken many a lance for this painting which I don't entirely like'.93 Mapping the prostitute on to the nude – facing and confusing the body in art (as symbol) with the body in life (as commodity) – produced a subversive, modern, hybrid imagery which congealed into old-masterdom in its turn.
Third, murder. In 1907 Olympia no longer represented the seamy side of the classic nude or refused so unequivocally the available and acceptable category of the courtesan.94 Emily Dimmock offered death – casual, brutal, unseemly, ungainly and anti-heroic in the realist mode – as a new gambit in the game of 'realising' the nude. She did not do this in a way rooted in the interplay of socio-political forces, like Daumier's Murder in the Rue Transnonain – she might have done, but Sickert was distanced from his sister's feminism – but just as a bit of the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary life washed up on the newspaper's front page.95 (This is the paradox of modern newspapers, that tragedy is tragedy because it violates our sense of order, but newspapers reorder that sense to make tragedy common.96) Murder does a certain amount of work for the realist body here. It raises the stakes in invoking an underside of prostitution which was once itself the underside of the nude. It displaces the nude as an allegorical or idealising category with the particularity of flesh, pain, weight, muscle-tone and vulnerability. It enacts that vulnerability lovingly, dramatising a struggle between flesh and paint, pattern and form, resolution and dissolution, in a mode that leads on to Bacon and Freud. And it offers us the peculiarly modern spectacle of sexual murder, even though – as Max Kozloff said in another context – 'How not to say too much seems to have become a matter of utmost laborious concern for Sickert'.
The Camden Town Murder: Dramatic Arrest of Robert Wood by Detective-Inspector Neil 12 October 1907 Illustrated Police Budget
British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Photo © British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Fig.19
The Camden Town Murder: Dramatic Arrest of Robert Wood by Detective-Inspector Neil 12 October 1907 Illustrated Police Budget
British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
Photo © British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London
The Camden Town Murder was (and remains) an unsolved crime. That was important, I think, to Sickert's sense of it. He was an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes and had a large collection of books on crime.97 Detective fiction tells two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation.98 The detective is at the centre of the crime novel from its inception with Edgar Allen Poe: through the ingenious interpretation of unconsidered details, he brings justice and narrative order to transgression and chaos. In one of the first detective stories – the 'Mystery of Marie Rogêt' (1842) – Poe's hero, Auguste Dupin, solves the murder without leaving his study by reading the newspapers.99 During the Camden Town Murder investigation, newspapers specifically encouraged their readers to play detective and make sense of the clues that had emerged so far.100 Sociologically, accounts of the detective story suggest that the power of the detective as a literary prototype lay in his ability 'to assuage the anxieties of a ... middle class audience' through the application of 'modern systems of scientific and rational enquiry' (fig.19). (Watson describes Holmes as 'the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen'.101) Psychoanalytically, the detective is held to embody something more archaic. As Freud, a fan of detective fiction, first pointed out, the great attraction of the detective novel is that it replays the primal scene – the child's first real or fantasised observation of sexual intercourse between the parents – at no risk to the viewer, with the curious child in us as the detective hero.102 But this socially or psychologically comforting sense of rational enquiry was scarcely borne out by the mass circulation newspapers. They fed an existing appetite for sensational stories while contributing to an attitude of social detachment. Sickert was true to this. As the Times critic commented in 1911 you 'could not tell from his paintings of people whether he likes or dislikes them, whether he knows them well or has never seen them before'.103 There are no legible expressions or circumstantial clues; just an aura of menace in the composition and in passages of stabbing brushwork on the breasts and abdomen. With the title, these tease us into a narrative reading they do nothing to support. And this sense of the contingent and quotidian derives from the newspapers rather than literature, since murder in popular fiction was by this point an index of moral decay.104 (This is also what distances Sickert from the Lustmord theme as it was taken up in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, by artists fascinated by Jack the Ripper, for example Otto Dix and George Grosz.105)
Newspapers saturated and 'textualised' the urban environment. They were the chief element in what has been called the 'word city', paralleling and mediating the social geography of the modern metropolis.106 The mass expansion of the press in the late nineteenth century was the consequence of increasing literacy combined with intensely competitive pricing and new forms of popular journalism. By 1910, London boasted twenty-eight morning and nine evening papers.107 They helped to fashion the urban experience. They advertised the latest commodities (were, indeed, among the first, mass-produced, instantly obsolescent commodities). They soothed commuting time and enlivened leisure time. They structured the day (Hegel said that they served as a modern substitute for morning prayers). They offered the 'imagined community' of a common readership consuming 'one-day-best-sellers' almost simultaneously.108 They were above all 'inseparable from the modern city and served as the perfect metonym for the city itself'.109
The newspaper both is, and is not, a narrative form, offering of necessity a series of slices through a plotless flow. Its defining characteristics were, and remain, the apparent arbitrariness – the substitutability – of its constituent items and their abrupt transitions. A newspaper is a mosaic of disjunctive parts assembled into the approximate and provisional unity of a familiar layout and a common date (things are happening independently but they are happening at the same time).110 On the one hand the newspaper promises to clarify and order the opacity and diversity of the modern city. On the other, the sheer proliferation of its stories emphasises the heterogeneity, the ultimate unknowability, of activities that take place locally but invisibly, and among strangers. As Barthes wrote: 'If we did not read the newspaper, our surroundings would not appear nearly as astonishing or apocalyptic'.111
Because newspapers were ineluctably contemporary they came to signify the modern, the contingent and the everyday. Because they were popular and cheap they seemed accessible and democratic. (Sickert valued genre painting because the narration 'of things in which anyone may take an interest' furnished a bridge across 'the much-discussed chasm between the producer and the consumer'.112) Because they were voraciously curious they opened up the smallest byways of the city to imaginative passage. ('Anything!' Sickert wrote in 1910. 'This is the subject matter of modern art. There is the quarry inexhaustible for ever.'113) But their stranded narratives were of necessity substitutable and incomplete, so that against their best intentions they frustrated the reader's desire to know. Sickert, in the Camden Town Murder paintings, registered the look of things, how taciturn they are, rather than making objects and gestures figure the drama as in a Victorian 'problem picture'. Despite his admiration for a journeyman-illustrator like Keene (whom he regarded as one of the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century), he was closer to 'an aesthetic of the newspaper' than to illustrators like those in the Police Budget and News. Sickert adds nothing to our image of the scene or to our knowledge of the event. This is the indifference of the newspaper: the momentary frisson of one more (shocking, sordid, titillating) story, rapidly overtaken by more pressing concerns in the reader's own life. Borrowing from the newspapers – his titles make this explicit – was a way of resisting allegory, of registering the ordinariness and the ultimate unknowability of the modern world.114 In 1912 a critic observed that Sickert 'never goes very deep beneath the surface of things. He illustrates life but never illuminates it.'115 In fact the reverse is true. In his rejection of the dramatic moment and the telling detail (beloved of journalists), Sickert cedes us the 'beholder's share': he illuminates life, but does not illustrate it.
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
The Studio: The Painting of a Nude 1906
Oil paint on canvas
750 x 495 mm
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Courtesy of Browse & Darby
Fig.20
Walter Richard Sickert
The Studio: The Painting of a Nude 1906
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
Courtesy of Browse & Darby
This is to look at the paintings in terms of their referent: the Camden Town Murder. I began by insisting on the relevance of the titles as neither totally mischievous nor totally arbitrary, that is, as having some necessary connection to Sickert's motives and to assumptions that viewers first brought to the work. I want now to step back from the murder as an event to the painting as an event. This could be seen as a retreat – or, according to preference, an advance – from life to art, from referent to surface, from the skin of the woman to the skin of the paint. But that is not what I mean. The murder remains. The question is rather how reference is expanded and displaced in the process of work. Paintings grow out of other paintings as well as (in concert with), nudges from 'life'. Artists come to conceive of their role, under modern conditions, in particular terms. Pictorial strategies develop in relation to rivals, genres, values and meanings, largely specific to the practice of art. As Sickert put it:
the practice of art, no more than lawn-tennis or chess, is not a natural thing. It is a highly artificial game, with conditions that have been evolved by players of the past in the same manner as has the form and exact make of a cricket bat. Its limitations are peremptory and permit of no excursions.116
The theme of a naked woman with a clothed man, which dominates Sickert's painting in the Camden Town period, first enters his work about 1906–7 with The Studio: The Painting of a Nude (fig.20) and The Poet and his Muse, also known as Collaboration.117 As the titles suggest, these are not images of sexual violence or despair but of workmanlike collusion in studio activity. They reveal beyond the isolated framing of the nude, the context and the agency through which that image is produced. The Studio: The Painting of a Nude is a quite remarkable, almost Brechtian, instance of this. Where, as a genre, the nude promotes untrammelled access to a naked body, the painter's arm, turned towards us, bars entry to the room and the model behind. The paintwork is extraordinarily rich, varied and diverting. Only gradually do we come to read the entire scene as a mirror reflection. The painter has his back to the model, and paints her reflection, along with the further reflection of her back as it is revealed in a mirrored wardrobe at the rear of the room.
Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942
Camden Town Murder c.1909
Pencil on paper
248 x 200 mm
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Fig.21
Walter Richard Sickert
Camden Town Murder c.1909
Private collection
© Estate of Walter R. Sickert / DACS
By courtesy of the Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Sickert's psychological dramas, then, including the murder paintings, emerge from the image of the artist and his model. Bearing this in mind, I want to bring in a number of further points. First, that modelling can be seen as the other trade in which a woman sells her naked body to a man for money.118 Second, that since Baudelaire and Manet, artists had come to compare themselves with prostitutes obliged to sell their wares in the market-place. (This was the price of freedom in what Pierre Bourdieu has called the 'autonomisation of the aesthetic field'.119) Third, that the modern artist could imagine an alliance with the prostitute in their mutual subversion of bourgeois values. (The prostitute engaged in an honest transaction as opposed to the middle class hypocrisy of 'marriage as a trade'; the independent artist, unlike the fashionable portraitists, did not, as Sickert put it: 'wear the livery of that fair despotism' which 'is a government of beings in matinée hats that hates art, as it hates all realities, as it hates work'.120) Fourth, that the artist might be identified with his creation, woman or prostitute. (Zola wrote of Olympia in 1867 that she was 'the flesh and blood of the painter ... the complete expression of his temperament ... the whole of him, and contains nothing but him ... I have read in her the personality of Manet'.121) Last, that Sickert chose to allegorise painting as 'a robust and racy wench'. Dismissing Whistler's Symphony in White, No.3 as a 'bad picture ... badly composed, badly drawn, badly painted' and appealing only to English sentiment, he insisted that: 'painting is a rough-tongued, hard-faced mistress, and her severe rule will brook no dallying of that sort'.122
This suggests the substitutions that undermine by overlaying the stable role of the male protagonist. His status, already uncertain as husband or murderer, already unsettling (as our surrogate 'eyes'), is complicated if he also stands in for the artist and the woman for the body of painting itself.123 This is to allegorise the relations of painter and model, culture and nature, artist and Art, in traditional ways.124 But then, the artist is also not his (masculine) stand-in but his (feminine) creature – the woman/prostitute – at the mercy of the market and 'a rough-tongued, hard-faced mistress' who is Painting herself. In Sickert's 'perversity', which could be figured as the tension between a bravura handling of surface and an implicitly sadistic treatment of his model in these pictures, it is Painting itself that is murdered and loved.125
Death
In her book Over her Dead Body, a study of the conjunction of femininity and death in art and literature, Elisabeth Bronfen asks how a representation can be both morbid and aesthetically pleasing.126 Or as Paul Konody put it in the Observer in 1912, how the spectator of these 'unsavoury and sordid' scenes was nevertheless obliged 'to admire in Mr Sickert's art that which he would turn away from with loathing in actual life'.127 Part of the answer is that the death we contemplate is not our own. As Walter Benjamin put it, 'What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about'.128 And part of the answer is that it isn't 'real'. Only as representation can death be contemplated. Sickert trod a fine line – finer and more troubling for viewers in 1911 than for us – between death in the aesthetic – a couple of models, some studio props, a painterly and surprisingly decorative facture – and death in the newspapers (the brute fact of a prostitute's throat slashed to the vertebrae in Camden Town).
Malcom Drummond 1880–1945
19 Fitzroy Street c.1913–14
Oil paint on canvas
710 x 508 mm
Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
© Estate of Malcolm Drummond
Photo © Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
Fig.22
Malcom Drummond
19 Fitzroy Street c.1913–14
Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
© Estate of Malcolm Drummond
Photo © Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
Questions of spectatorship are therefore particularly pointed but particularly obscure. Early in 1907 Sickert founded the Fitzroy Group, inviting guests to a series of Saturday 'At Homes'. He did so, he wrote to Ethel Sands, 'for 2 reasons. Because it is more interesting to people to see the work of 7 or 9 people than one and because I want to keep up an incessant proselytizing agency to accustom people to mine and other painters' works of a modern character' (fig.22).129 It is not clear whether Sickert showed his Camden Town Murder paintings at these gatherings (they were not otherwise exhibited in England until 1911) or whether by 'modern character' he meant specifically modern sexual subject matter as well as a modern, broken facture. For conservatives like Sir William Blake Richmond, the drawings he showed in January 1911 were 'odious': 'being "Dirty" they are demoralizing and ought to come under [notice of] the police ... Sexualism in Art can only be redeemed by grand treatment. This is worse than Slum Art, worse far than Prostitution, because it is done by a man [who] should know better.'130 But writing in the Daily Chronicle in 1913, the critic C. Lewis Hind acknowledged the effect of the Saturday 'At Homes' in reconciling him to Sickert's choice of 'the petty and notorious Camden Town murder and other sordid interior happenings as subjects for pictures and sketches'.131
Charles Harrison has proposed that it is one of the marks of a modern picture that it addresses itself to a particular spectator.132 Where do we stand in relation to L'Affaire de Camden Town, or, as Victor Burgin once asked, who does this picture think you are? What is our connection, as viewers, to the witness in the room (what's called in narrative the 'internal focaliser')? There is at least the possibility of something more companionable in the study, but the painting reinforces the sadistic mastery of the controlling gaze. Our position is even more compromising. We are the voyeurs. We take up what Degas and Sickert called the keyhole view, spatially and psychologically.133 He looms threateningly over her but we are the intruders who look unhindered at the most intimate part of her anatomy, and her blindness – her inability to interrupt or challenge that look – is absolute. Sickert's space is visceral, subtly distorted, not perspectivally ordered and plain. The light sources come from different directions. The looming figure stands on a higher plane. The large area of busy wallpaper sets the whole thing off key.134 In the French tradition it was 'obvious' that Sickert's nudes were prostitutes. Louis Vauxcelles, in a review of the earlier nudes, described Sickert's handling of space and form as the consequence of multiple 'taches', a word meaning marks or spots but also blotches and stains.135 In Vauxcelles's French prose it is possible to conflate a description of the paint surface with a comment on its referent. If the bourgeois interior is a space of seclusion from the public world, these bruised, stained bodies on dishevelled beds are commodities in their place of work. Sexual violence becomes an extreme, an intimate, version of the penetration of privacy that is their métier.
On the other hand, Sickert does not take up a moral position; does not render the nude mysterious; does not offer to give her meaning, but owns up to a voyeuristic perversity and compromises us in that too.136 What T.J. Clark has defined as 'the nude's most characteristic form of address' was always 'a dreamy offering of self, that looking which was not quite looking'; or, in place of her averted gaze, the spectator might be offered instead 'a pair of eyes within the picture space: the look of Cupid or the jester's desperate stare, the familiarity of a servant or a lover'.137 Both these options are blocked by Sickert. There is no 'dreamy offering' of self (the viewer's guilt-free alibi), and no easy identification with a murderous surrogate (or one who is bereft).138 A viewer of either sex is likely to feel uncomfortable and unsafe: the nude is rendered as victim and flesh, the libidinal gaze of the voyeur is contaminated by sadism and guilt, and the ethical gaze of the witness is compromised by the forced perspective of the voyeur.
There is, however, both a moral detachment and a paradoxical resonance of colour and brushwork in L'Affaire de Camden Town that sets it apart from the narratives of fallen women in nineteenth-century painting and from the trope of the prostitute as an easy emblem of social, political or feminine corruption. The corpse is the ultimate in abjection, the waste that can never be recuperated, the body that is no longer an 'I'.139 The Camden Town Murder paintings are paintings of death. But because they are paintings they are also the products of love and work, of a relation with two particular models in a studio mis-en-scène.140 Their understatement and self-conscious facticity remind us of that. Or as Sickert put it in another context: 'The subject of painting is, perhaps, that it is not death. It is, perhaps, nothing more.'141
Notes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Yale University Press for their permission to reprint this essay first published in Lisa Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, New Haven 2000, pp.11–47.
Lisa Tickner is Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
How to cite
Lisa Tickner, 'Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime', in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May 2012, https://www
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Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/lisa-tickner-walter-sickert-the-camden-town-murder-and-tabloid-crime-r1104355
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