At 19 quai Voltaire in Paris stands the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire. Fronting onto the Seine and facing the Louvre across the river, it opened in the nineteenth century and since then artistes of many colours have found it an auspicious location from which to pen bon mots, write libretto, draw naked models or paint the view. Living in straitened times, Richard Wagner wrote a begging letter from the hotel in 1861 (he required of Baron Ferdinand von Hornstein 10,000 francs to ‘put my life in order’). Despite the relative penury in which he lived for the final eighteen months of his life, Oscar Wilde stayed there for a time. (Of his Paris sojourn he said, ‘I am dying beyond my means.’) In the autumn of 1906, Walter Sickert stayed long enough to make a series of drawings and paintings of the female nude, of which this drawing is an example. A closely related oil painting of the subject was made in the same year. The signature and inscription were added by Sickert in retrospect some decades after the drawing was made; he was not elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy (‘A.R.A.’) until 1924.