At first glance and with the title in mind, this ‘Echo’ appears to be a scene from a popular melodrama or lurid novel of the mid-Victorian period. The London Journal, for which Sir John Gilbert (1817-1897) made many illustrations, was known for its serialisation of ‘sensational novels’. So far so good; Rebecca Daniels in her valiant truffling of the London Journal found that Collaboration was based on a moment between Lady Louvane and Nora in The Star in the Dark. But Daniels went on to suggest that the word ‘Collaboration’ inscribed in the lower centre of the painting refers to Sickert’s own collaboration with Gilbert whose name appears at lower left. Even so, the title is suggestive and may well refer to the interview between these two women, in a grand salon or bedroom. Almost certainly Sickert would not have read The Star in the Dark and nor, unfortunately, has the present writer. It is obvious that something stirred Sickert to paint this elaborate scene – more like a passage from a Verdi opera such as La Traviata (which he did indeed draw on; see Baron 591) than the ‘shilling shocker’, perhaps, of the original. The sumptuous colour scheme and theatrical setting may well contain vivid memories of Sickert’s experience of Venetian art: the ‘Echoes’ and theatre paintings of the 1930s frequently remind us of Titian and Tintoretto. Sickert’s habit of transcribing the name of the artist responsible for the ‘Echoes’ was his way of acknowledging the past just as the transcription of photographers’ names or other texts on canvases takes us right into the present (The Divine Peggy – Lady Teazle).