In June 1887, Sickert and his wife Nellie visited the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen. In 1881, the Baedeker guide for Belgium and Holland described it as ‘a clean fishing-village with 12,300 inhabitants’. Annual visitors outnumbered locals by nearly two to one. Degas made pastels of the seaside, but Sickert’s biographer Matthew Sturgis suggests that ‘the excursion may have been, in part, an act of piety, for Whistler had painted and etched there often.’ Sickert’s etching focuses attention upon the high-backed, well-sheltered wicker ‘wind chairs’ (windstoelen) that populated the beach. Bromberg records twelve etchings of Scheveningen made in 1887, all of them readily identifiable by Sickert’s inscription on the plates.