Only rarely in Sickert’s printmaking activities did he make a drawing and then realise the subject in etching alone. This was the case for “Mr Johnson”: this drawing was the sole precursor to a large, unpublished etching and a small, published one. “Mr Johnson” was made using Sickert’s ‘favourite goose quill’. It was perhaps intended for the weekly New Age magazine, which reproduced fifteen drawings by Sickert as full-page illustrations between January and June 1912, many of them in the same quill-pen style. It was never published, however. The drawing correlates closely with the mark-making of the related small etching, which even replicates the idiosyncratic pattern of the carpet at the lower right-hand corner.

On the back wall in the picture, Sickert quoted an Italian phrase, written down for him by Degas. This occurs in both the drawing and the print: Fare tutti mestieri svergognati per campar onoratamente (‘practise all shameful trades to live honourably’). Wendy Baron has suggested that the woman combing her hair in the background is Mr Johnson’s mistress; Ruth Bromberg supposed that the woman had resorted to prostitution, which makes Mr Johnson either her pimp or her customer. Unlike other lettered titles in the Carfax series of Sickert’s prints, the man’s name was printed in inverted commas as “Mr Johnson”. This might imply an assumed identity and a desire for anonymity, motivated either by shame or professional criminality.