After the death of his wife Christine in October 1920, Sickert withdrew from Envermeu where they had lived together and settled for a time in Dieppe. At 22 rue Aguado, he made paintings, drawings and prints that clearly depict the same furnished room. It was filled by a bed with carved bedknobs and a large mirrored wardrobe (an armoire à glace), which was the departure point and a compositional lynchpin in several works. The early title of L’Armoire à Glace, used in John Middleton Murry's article in 1923 and at Sickert's prints exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1925, was ‘mon rève, ça a toujours été d'avoir une armoire à glace’. This translates as: ‘My dream, it has always been to have a mirrored wardrobe’. In a letter to his new patron W. H. Stephenson, 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.’