A limited thriller series titled Sickert, drawing on events in London during 1888, has László Nemes — the filmmaker behind Son of Saul — attached as both director and co-writer. The narrative centres on a painter who moves between the art salons of London and the working-class neighbourhoods whose residents sat for his portraits, occupying a world adjacent to the communities where the Jack the Ripper murders were taking place. His movements draw the attention of Scotland Yard, while uncertainty about his own culpability takes hold within him.
Details of the project came to light through a broadcast outlet on Wednesday. The screenplay carries Nemes and Adam Baroukh as co-writers, while Alexander Rodnyansky's AR Content banner handles production duties, with Nemes, Rodnyansky, Stuart Manashil, and Michael Kupisk all holding executive producer credits. No broadcast partner has been lined up for the series.
In a written statement, Nemes described a long-held connection to the case dating back to his childhood, pointing to an enduring draw toward what he called the mystery surrounding Victorian London's gothic atmosphere and the figure considered by many to be the first modern serial killer, with the project envisioned as something at once sweeping in scope and deeply personal in character.
The painter Walter Sickert, born in Germany and long rooted in the Camden Town neighbourhood, built a career rendering music halls, modest rented interiors, and working-class life on canvas. At no point during 1888 did suspicion attach itself to him. Decades after the Whitechapel killings, a hypothesis connecting him to those events took shape in part through his own body of work.
The 1976 publication by Stephen Knight gave wider circulation to the idea, drawing on an account from the painter's son Joseph, who stated two years later — in 1978 — that the story was of his own making. In 2002, Patricia Cornwell mounted a challenge to received wisdom through Portrait of a Killer, grounding her case in DNA analysis of letters attributed to the Ripper, examination of the stationery on which they were written, and a structural reading of compositional elements within Sickert's paintings. Art history as a discipline has not, on the whole, engaged with that same line of argument.
Wendy Baron, whose catalogue of his paintings and drawings was published by Yale, has described the theory as unsupported by the available evidence.
Completed around 1907 and held in the collection of the Manchester Art Gallery, the painting titled Jack the Ripper's Bedroom depicts a middle-class sleeping room where pink light filters through closed blinds and the surrounding furniture emerges only partially from the surrounding darkness. Sickert held the room at 6 Mornington Crescent as his own. According to the landlady's account, the tenant who rented the room in 1888 was, in her personal estimation, the Ripper — a conviction that prompted him to depict the scene on canvas and give the work that name. His approach to the canvas was that of an investigator examining a piece of physical evidence.
Whether the painting gave rise to its title or the title shaped the painting into being, Baron has noted, remains an open question. In 1907, the murder of Emily Dimmock took place within walking distance of Sickert's studio — a location he later visited — and the Camden Town Murder series of paintings emerged from that period, each canvas showing a clothed man seated at a bed's edge beside a reclining nude woman, her stillness explained only by the titles Sickert attached to the works.
It is the body of painted work, rather than the 1888 police record, that accounts for the continued presence of his name in public memory. Over the years, numerous screen adaptations have drawn from the case, each anchoring its narrative around the unresolved question of the perpetrator's identity.
Nemes received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Son of Saul, a picture that had already claimed the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2015, after which two period dramas — Sunset and Orphan — followed. For Sickert, Nemes has outlined a visual approach rooted in the painter's depictions of Whitechapel and in documentary evidence from the period. The series opens with a candidate name already in mind, then puts the question of whether that person genuinely fits the role to the subject directly. Sickert's paintings form the basis of suspicion against him, and the series intends to examine the case through the visual framework those works provide.
