Cornwell donates art by Jack the Ripper suspect
American crime writer Patricia Cornwell is giving a Harvard museum 82 works by British impressionist Walter Sickert, a collection she amassed while researching a book that argued he was Jack the Ripper.
Cornwell, who is best-known for her series of mystery novels featuringforensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta, has promised to donate 82 drawings, paintings and prints to the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mass., the Art Newspaper reported on its website Sunday.
Cornwell bought the collection — one of thelargest of Sickert's works —for the equivalent of $6.34 million Cdn in order to study similarities between his art and some elements of the slayings.
She developed contacts with the Fogg museum —part of Harvard University — in order to research the sequel to her 2002 book about Jack the Ripper, the Art Newspaper said.
Cornwell shocked the art world with Portrait of a Killer: Jack theRipper, Case Closedin which she alleges that Sickert was actually Jack the Ripper, the nickname given to a serial killer or killers whoterrified Victorian England with the vicious slayings offive prostitutes in 1888.
Sickert was born in the German city of Munich in 1860 and later moved to England. Until his death in 1942, helived in the Whitechapel area of London where the prostitutes' bodies were found.
However, Cornwell's contention about Sickert has been rejected by many people, including Matthew Sturgis, a Sickert biographer.
Through Marjorie Cohn, the acting director of the Fogg in 2003, Cornwell was introduced to staff at the museum's Straus Center for Conservation.
The Straus Center assisted the author in some of her research. Cornwell gave the centre a piece of forensic equipment to compare Sickert's drawings, paintings and letters with letters and drawings that the killer left forpolice.
Paintings resemble mortuary photos
The 82 works are already on loan at the Fogg, butCornwell has promised to donate them permanently, saying she wants the public to have access to them.
The 24 paintings, 22 drawings and 36 prints include several works thatfigure prominently in Cornwell's hypothesis: Putana a Casa (Prostitute at Home), which allegedly resembles the mortuary photographs of one Ripper victim, Catherine Eddowes; and In Grover's Island from Richmond Hill, which Cornwell says has a rising sun that mimics the front door of the Rising Sun pub where another victim was found.
Cornwell has also donated 23 prints and two drawings by James McNeill Whistler, who was born in Lowell, Mass. Sickert studied under Whistler, who spent most of his time in England and France.
Whistler is probably known best for his piece Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artists' Mother, also known as "Whistler's Mother." The 1871 painting shows a side view of a woman clothed in a severe black dress, sitting on a rocker with a bonnet on her head.