Augustus John studied at the Slade School of Art between 1894 and 1898, and this drawing was made shortly after he had left. It depicts another Slade student, Mary Spencer-Edwards, who later married fellow alumnus Ambrose McEvoy. Fine drawing was the raison d’etre of the Slade, and it was hammered home in the Life Class under the discerning eye and critical tongue of Henry Tonks. As another one of John’s fellow students, Edna Clarke-Hall, later recalled, ‘Tonks very much disliked fussy drawings, he wanted clean, straightforward drawings with beautiful lines. “Choose your line and draw it,” he used to say.’ He forbade rubbing out, and had no time for smudging—‘you just had to be very good at lines.’ Drawing was where John’s greatest strength lay, and he learnt by extensive practice, combined with disciplined study of past masters—a further practice Tonks keenly encouraged. As another contemporary student recorded, Tonks ‘advised us to go every day for ten or fifteen minutes to the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum, or the Print Room of the British Museum, to study one picture, make a sketch of its pattern and rhythm, and buy a postcard reproduction and pin it up at home.’ Serious study was thus the foundation of John’s technique. As the artist John Piper observed in 1940, ‘John’s distinction as a draughtsman and his sense of proportion are the result of intensive museum study.’

The year this drawing was made was an important one for the young artist: he was invited to join the New English Art Club, exhibiting with them for the first time that April. He also showed at the Carfax Gallery, which William Rothenstein and John Fothergill had established that same year. And in the summer of 1899 he was invited to Normandy to join Rothenstein and his new wife, Alice, on holiday there along with a number of other friends, including Charles Conder and William Orpen. It was on this trip that Rothenstein painted John as one of the characters in The Doll’s House. Travelling on to Paris, Rothenstein introduced John to the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Another artist he admired there was Honoré Daumier.

John was very poor at this period of his life, though any money he earned from a sale was quickly spent. Spencer Gore later remarked how admirers took advantage of John’s frequent changes of address to collect the torn-up scraps that littered the floor after he left. ‘I know people who got many wonderful drawings that way’, Gore recalled, by piecing them back together again. One such was Wyndham Lewis, who treasured what he called his ‘book of John’s torn-up drawings’. His poverty meant that John often used friends, like Mary Spencer-Edwards (the future wife of his friend Ambrose McEvoy), as models. He would find sitters wherever he could, later recalling how a young woman he befriended one night on the Tottenham Court Road and employed as a model, though ‘poor enough herself […] would sometimes offer me a pound or two if she thought I needed it.’ If he required smart clothes for a special occasion he borrowed them from another friend, the older artist Charles Conder. One night Orpen ran into him, ‘drunk as a lord’ and dressed in Conder’s curious, old-fashioned clothes that he had bought in Paris flea markets—‘checked waistcoat, high collar, tail-coat, striped trousers.’