Which artist was posthumously suspected of being Jack the Ripper?

Jack the Ripper is the name given to an unidentified serial killer active during the summer and autumn of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London, England. His main victims were five prostitutes, who he dissected and mutilated. Walter Sickert (1860-1942) was a German-British painter and printmaker. He was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London and became an important influence on British styles of art in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Despite evidence suggesting Sickert was in France in 1888, several authors named Sickert as a potential culprit. Although Sickert was not in the country, he did find the murders intriguing and painted 'Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom' in 1905. Sickert based the painting on a room he lodged in after the landlady told him her suspicions of a man that stayed there a few years earlier.

In 2002, crime writer Patricia Cornwell (b.1956) adamantly claimed Sickert was Jack the Ripper in her book 'Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed'. Years earlier, Stephen Knight (1951-85) suggested Sickert was an accomplice in 'Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution' (1976), although his sources of research were later discovered to be a hoax. All the information collected by Knight and Cornwell has since been scrutinised, and the consensus is any claim that Sickert was Jack the Ripper is fantasy.