The first wave of Sickert’s reputation rested on his depictions of music-hall entertainment – the artistes, the audience and the theatres’ interiors. These latter were frequently hung with enormous framed mirrors which gave a somewhat spurious sense of luxury and space to the often cramped, restricted auditorium. Sickert used these spatial elisions to superb and complex effect in his early paintings, developing lessons learnt from Degas whom he had met in 1885. Although in the late 1880s and the 1890s he painted more mainstream, West End productions, the bulk of his theatre paintings depict the halls (frequently adjoining a pub). Of these he is most associated with the Bedford Theatre, Camden Town, and the artistes who frequently appeared there. The Bedford Theatre, with its entrance up an alleyway off Camden High Street, attracted nearly all the great stars of the late Victorian music hall such as Marie Lloyd, Vesta Victoria and George Robey. The Old Bedford (depicted here) was demolished in 1898 and was swiftly rebuilt, opening as The Bedford Palace of Varieties in 1899. This is the New Bedford seen in a series of paintings by Sickert celebrating the posh gilt interior with its plaster swags and caryatids, begun by the artist in circa 1908 and taken up again in 1915. If it were not for a succession of great paintings by Sickert, the Bedford (and some of its performers such as Little Dot Hetherington) would hardly be remembered. The theatre was closed in 1959, became derelict and vandalised and was demolished ten years later. For nearly a hundred years it had served the Camden Town community and visitors from far afield with songs and turns and patter (frequently recorded by Sickert in his drawings) that reflected a whole section of contemporary society.