The subject of this drawing has been identified by Rebecca John as Augustus John and Dorelia McNeill’s daughter, Poppet John (1912–1997). A photograph in the albums of Lady Ottoline Morrell—who was occasionally visited by John and his family and with whom John had an intimate friendship in 1908—shows Poppet in 1924 with a distinctive bob haircut and fringe. In this pencil drawing, she wears the same haircut; it was most likely made in or around the year that Lady Ottoline’s photograph was taken. This drawing may also have been a preparatory work relating to an oil painting of Poppet, which John made in 1924.

Poppet modelled for her father on several occasions throughout the twenties and thirties. His paintings and drawings of her chronicle her development from the naivety of childhood, through the uncertainties of early adolescence, and swiftly into the sexual maturity of early adulthood. Anticipating Jacob Epstein and Lucian Freud, John sometimes depicted his daughter in the nude; his biographer Michael Holroyd described Poppet in these images as ‘a provocative sex-kitten’. A clothed half-length portrait of Poppet, The Artist’s Daughter (c. 1927–28, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), probably made when she was fifteen, shows her in the liminal zone between the physical and emotional immaturity of childhood and the self-awareness and self-possession of very early adulthood. Later drawings of Poppet in the nude, variously reclining and bearing her chest, lack the tenderness and vivacity of earlier characterisations such as this and related works from the early to mid-twenties. In these earlier pictures, John’s fondness for her is strongly apparent. As the artist Christopher Wood wrote to his mother after visiting the John household in October 1926, ‘John has a little daughter of fifteen, like a Venus, whom he thinks a lot of’.