No. Edgar Degas was never a suspect in the Whitechapel murders, the killings of women in that East London district in 1888, blamed on an unknown man called Jack the Ripper.
The painter who does get accused is Degas's British pupil, Walter Sickert, and the case against him collapses: its source called his own story a hoax, its paper and DNA evidence fit far too many people, and dated records put him in France that autumn.
In the early 1880s the young Sickert worked in London as the pupil and assistant of James McNeill Whistler, an American painter settled there, best known today for the portrait of his mother. In 1883 Sickert traveled to Paris to deliver one of Whistler's paintings to the Salon, the official exhibition held in the French capital every year.
On that trip he met Degas, who became his mentor. Years later, what Degas had taught him would show in a small picture of a bedroom.
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Around 1907 Sickert painted the bedroom of the lodgings he rented in Camden Town, in North London. The room is seen through an open door, dark, with a dressing table and two chairs, and pink light filtering through the slats of a blind. The picture became known as "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom."
In 1980 a collector left the canvas to Manchester Art Gallery in her will. The novelist Patricia Cornwell later cited it in her 2002 book as evidence that Sickert was the Ripper. The canvas itself had not changed, only the name attached to it.
The landlady's story
The title goes back to something Sickert's landlady told him about a man who had lived in that room before him…
What You'll Discover
Where the accusation really started.
What a novelist did to a painting.
Where Sickert spent that autumn.
What Degas taught his pupil.