Painter. He was German-born English painter, who was a dominant figure in 19th-century British Impressionism. Born Walter Richard Sickert into a Danish-German family in Munich, his family moved to London in 1868. He used his middle Richard professionally. He had shown early artistic talent, but he first worked unsuccessfully as an actor, and then studied painting at the Slade School, London. For a while, he was J. Whistler's assistant, and later in Paris, he worked with Edgar Degas. In 1885 he married Ellen Cobden, the daughter of the influential Liberal politician Richard Cobden. The marriage was childless and unhappy. His wife divorced him in 1899. In 1911 he married Christine Drummond Angus, his student, who was eighteen years his junior. She died in 1920. Sickert had studios in the East End, a working-class section of London, where between August and November of 1888 five prostitutes were murdered. In 1909, he produced a series of paintings, known as the Camden Town Murders, which were based on these killings by Jack the Ripper. One of Sickert's works was named "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom". His studio become the center for young artists, which, at Sickert's suggestion, called themselves the Camden Town Group, named from the district of London in which he lived. From 1920 to 1922 he lived in Dieppe. His third wife, whom he married in 1926, was the painter Thérèse Lessore. From 1924 Sickert was an associate of the Royal Academy, and from 1928 to 1930, its President. As a well-known figure, he met briefly Winston Churchill, a talented amateur painter, who invited him to Chartwell to give advice on technique. In the 1990 book "Portrait of a Killer" by Patricia Cornwell, the author claims that Sickert is the serial killer, Jack the Ripper. However Ripperologists have not favored this theory and for the majority the exact identity of the suspect remains mysterious.