In 1882, Sickert went to help Whistler in his studio as a printing assistant. Mortimer Menpes considered himself and Sickert to be Whistler’s ‘only two genuine pupils’, and remembered a time when ‘we used to travel all round London painting nature from the top of hansom cabs’. According to his friend and biographer Robert Emmons, Sickert’s interest in etching ‘was first aroused by the example of his master […]. In his earliest plates, indeed, it is difficult to distinguish the chrysalis from the butterfly.’ He added that these early plates were ‘bitten and printed in Whistler’s studio’. Piccadilly is one of the many small formative prints that Sickert made around London in 1883–85, drawing onto a prepared copper plate plein air from evanescent subjects. In this respect he was following the example of Whistler, whose etching method Sickert later characterised as ‘swift improvisation from nature’. The wide empty foreground is populated only by a lamp post, which extends upwards through most of the picture space and creates a reference point for the scale of passersby, railings, buildings, the trees of Green Park and distant horse-drawn carriages. Only one other impression of the second state of Piccadilly is known to exist.