In 1924, the Lancashire newspaper proprietor W. H. Stephenson purchased Sickert’s painting L’Armoire à Glace [Baron 2006, no. 557]. The artist was appreciative and supplemented the purchase by giving Stephenson this related preparatory drawing, which he inscribed: ‘To W. H. Stephenson in grateful sympathy’. In a letter to his new patron, Sickert described with novelistic detail the woman who is seated beside her mirrored wardrobe: ‘It is a sort of study à la Balzac. The little lower middle-class woman […] sitting by the wardrobe which is her idol and bank, so devised that the overweight of the mirror-door would bring the whole structure down on her if it were not temporarily held back by a wire hitched on an insecure nail in insecure plaster. But a devoted, unselfish, uncomplaining wife and mother, inefficient shopper and atrocious cook.’ This presentation drawing was brought to a high level of finish before the borders were ruled and the scene tinted with russet-hued watercolour. It is closely related to the style of contemporaneous works by Sickert such as The Waterproof Hat, in which the same stain-like use of russet watercolour was made.