
The Metropolitan Museum of Art


From the Yale Center for British Art:
This is one of several paintings Walter Sickert made in response to a gruesome murder of a prostitute that took place in Camden, North London, in September 1907. Sickert, who had worked in the area for several years, was intrigued by the unsolved case, using the title The Camden Town Murder for a group of paintings between 1908 and 1909. None of these works depict an actual murder, with the woman in this painting popularly supposed to be sleeping rather than dead. Sickert’s use of the alternative title in parentheses—a wry parody of Victorian narrative paintings—confirms the artist’s refusal to confirm a single meaning for this enigmatic picture. What is never in doubt, however, is Sickert’s commitment to subject matter that many of his contemporaries would have seen as sordid, rendered in a markedly modern style.
Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
For a full discussion on the painting and the series, visit Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime by Lisa Tickner published by the Tate.
Tour of Madame Tussauds London – 1998
Tour of Madame Tussauds London Chamber of Horrors – 2022

“In this eerie surrealist painting, a murderer nonchalantly haunts the scene of his crime, unaware that it is surrounded by detectives who wait to pounce on the perpetrator. How long have they been watching? It seems that the voyeurs at the window and the bowler-hatted men, one armed with a club and another with a net, who stand concealed in the room must have been there when the woman was killed. They are complicit. Magritte’s deadpan art unsettles by melting boundaries between reality and fantasy. Here he reveals that crime and punishment are mirrors of each other, that detectives and police officers are mysteriously dependent on the existence of crime.”
Happy Year of the Rabbit!


Taken from The Library of Congress: The Rabbit Witch and Other Tales by Katharine Pyle, 1938


In honor of All Saints’ Day, here are gruesome paintings of their trials. Visit Daydream Tourist’s Shocking Paintings of Martyred Saints for a full article and more paintings.



