Citizen

He painted a picture of a dingy back bedroom in Mornington Crescent and called it Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. He hung it. He told people his landlady believed the previous lodger had been the man. Then, when a girl called Emily Dimmock was found with her throat cut in a Camden lodging house, he painted the scene four times over and titled the series after the murder. One canvas he called What Shall We Do for the Rent? A hundred years later people are still arguing about what he knew, and every one of those arguments starts with evidence he supplied himself.

He was the best painter in England at looking at rooms nobody wanted looked at. He went into the music halls — the Bedford, Gatti's — and painted the audience instead of the star: the faces in the gallery, lit from below, half-lost in gaslight and mirror. He painted naked women on iron bedsteads in Camden lodgings, unarranged, ungilded, in bad light, at a moment when English painting still expected a nude to be a goddess or nothing. He worked from drawings and memory rather than from the sitter, which meant the model was never really the subject. The room was.

He began as an actor. He toured in Henry Irving's company, walked on with a good face and a good voice, and gave it up to be a painter, which by every practical measure was the worse job. He served as Whistler's assistant, printing and etching. Then Whistler sent him to Paris to deliver a canvas to Degas, and Degas told him to stop painting what was in front of him. He went back to London and spent the rest of his life doing exactly that: staging the world from notes, in the dark, from the wrong angle, in the wrong part of town.

He founded the Camden Town Group, taught, and painted on into old age from newspaper photographs when he could no longer be bothered with life. Elected to the Royal Academy at seventy-four, he resigned a year later over an insult to another artist. He died in Bath in 1942 and left behind the most convincing body of murder-adjacent painting ever produced by a man who was almost certainly guilty of nothing.

Forget the theories and the hundred-year argument. Remember only this: he made himself the most suspicious man in London on purpose, and he did it by painting exactly what he saw.