Crime Writer to Donate 82 Sickerts to Harvard

From the Art Newspaper Bulletin:

"Patricia Cornwell, who believes that the artist was Jack the Ripper, has promised her entire collection to the Fogg Art Museum

By Martin Bailey | Posted 20 August 2006

LONDON. The crime writer Patricia Cornwell has promised to donate 82 works by the artist Walter Sickert to the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is part of Harvard University. This massive collection, worth millions of dollars, was assembled while Ms Cornwell was writing Portrait of a Killer, published in 2002. The controversial book concludes that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, who brutally murdered prostitutes in London’s East End in 1888."

Full article here.

It's funny that this should come on the heels of a recent exhibition: Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870–1910, Catalog of the exhibition by Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson an exhibition at Tate Britain, London,October 5, 2005–January 15, 2006; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.,February 18–May 14, 2006(Tate Publishing, 231 pp., $55.00) and a biography, Walter Sickert: A Life by Matthew Sturgis (HarperCollins, 768 pp., $50.00) both of which were reviewed by Sanford Schwarz in the May 25, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books.

Yale University Press also has Paintings, which was the catalogue a retrospective exhibition of Sickert's works at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in the early 1990s. Wendy Baron, director of the British Government Art Collection, has a future book coming out next year on Sickert's Paintings and Drawings which should be nearly definitive.