Music hall was the pre-eminent metropolitan popular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its performers ranged from bawdy public-house turns to the early celebrities of Hollywood such as Charlie Chaplin. Sickert went to halls on London’s peripheries at Shoreditch, Canning Town, Camden Town, as well as those in the West End such as the Oxford on Oxford Street, the Empire in Leicester Square and the Middlesex (or ‘Old Mo’) in Drury Lane. ‘He came because he loved it, because it was moving with a colourful, romantic life of its own’, Emmons wrote. For long periods of Sickert’s career, beginning in 1884 or so, Sickert visited the music halls and there made drawings and etchings from life.

The gallery afforded cheap seats for music hall’s least affluent patrons. This drawing depicts the gallery at the Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town. A motley crowd, reflected by a large mirror on the left, is packed into tight rows. Two lean against the front of the balcony, the head of one framed beneath a handrail. The classical architecture—swags, pilasters, friezes—is a flamboyant kind typical of pleasure palaces. This drawing dates from 1894 or so when the original Bedford was still standing, while Sickert’s etchings of the same subject were made some years after it had been demolished and rebuilt more grandly. They consequently became depictions of the ‘Old’ Bedford. Sickert’s decision to etch this subject suggests a partiality for both the lost building and his earlier paintings and drawings of it, which he made in several versions [Baron 2006, no. 97]. It is not known when Sickert began work on the large plate, but he adopted it as one of the Carfax series of etchings, reworked it extensively, and it was published in 1915.