Almost all of Walter Sickert’s drawings can be related to a finished oil painting. His drawings were used as preliminary studies to work through the composition and effects of lighting. That is the case for this drawing of Little Rachel which relates to a painting of the same title (1907, Private Collection). Sickert made a total of five paintings of ‘Little Rachel’, a girl subsequently identified as Miss Siderman – the daughter of his local grocer in Mornington Crescent. Both Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud admired Sickert’s draughtsmanship. There was at least one occasion on which Bacon used a drawing by Sickert as the basis for a painting. Painting (1950, Leeds Art Gallery) took inspiration from Conversation (c. 1909, Royal College of Art), a drawing in which the shadow of a standing woman ominously looms forward, seeming to overtake the woman who casts it. Speaking to Martin Gayford in 2003, Lucian Freud later brought direct attention to the quality of Sickert’s drawings. 'With Sickert... even when his pictures are not so good there is an underlying drawing that keeps them at a certain level.' The admiration of these two highly significant post-war British painters suggests Sickert’s standing, as both an artist and specifically as a draughtsman. The provenance of this Little Rachel drawing is of note. R.F. Shaw-Kennedy was a reserve officer in the Territorial Army until 1960, holding the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Known as ‘Ronnie’ to his friends, he was subsequently elected as a Conservative councillor, serving first in Berkeley Ward between 1962 and 1964, and later for Regent Street ward from 1964 until his resignation in 1971. He formed a small art collection in the 1950s, acquiring work not only by Sickert but also Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Philip Wilson Steer. Aside from art, Shaw-Kennedy occasionally participated in cricket matches arranged by the Eton Manor Clubs.