Sickert painted The Balcony at Brighton in August or September 1915. He was staying with his friend Walter Taylor whose house at 4 Bedford Square—a three-sided ‘square’ that opens onto the seafront—is the setting for the painting. It was painted from life at a time when Sickert had begun to rediscover the virtue of pochades, small-scale oil studies on panel of the kind he made thirty years earlier under the influence of Whistler. In the following summers of 1916–18 he made many more panel paintings of a similar size. The green ironwork railings depicted in The Balcony adorn the first-floor balconies of the terrace between 4 and 7 Bedford Square, and they are verifiably those which adorn the square today. The railings along the right-hand side of the picture are steeply foreshortened, a characteristic compositional device that Sickert used often. The view in the painting looks north towards the south-facing terrace at the top of the square, which shimmers in the sunshine. From the shade of the balcony, this brilliant reflective daylight creates a contrejour effect. The Balcony was signed by Sickert ‘Rd. St.’ a decade or so after the painting was completed, sometime after the mid-twenties when Sickert dropped ‘Walter’ for ‘Richard’.

During his summer visit to Brighton in 1915, Sickert painted one of his most celebrated pictures, Brighton Pierrots. He also made at least two drawings from Bedford Square. One shows the south-facing terrace at the top of the square and another more complete drawing looks southeast towards the West Pier.

Many details about Sickert’s visits to Brighton are recorded in his letters to Ethel Sands, which are preserved in the Tate Archive. His earliest documented trip to Taylor’s in Brighton was in spring 1915, when he went to recuperate after a severe and unexplained illness. In August or September the same year, he wrote to Sands: ‘Taylor is a charming host. He has just given me a sublime red leather armchair. Also we often have crab for luncheon, such crabs!’ In another letter Sickert referred to Brighton Pierrots. ‘My Brighton picture is a bit of all right. […] I have been every night for five weeks to the Pierrot theatre. It has been delightful and interesting. I have also done a large pencil and watercolour of the Brighton front which is taking and will sell.’ Some years later Sickert and his third wife Thérèse returned briefly to live in Hove in 1926, and his appreciation of the place stemmed from its Regency flavour, which likewise gave him a taste for Bath and Margate where he lived at other times in his life.

It was Sickert’s friendship with Walter Taylor (1860–1943) that led him to stay in Brighton. A painter, connoisseur, collector and dandy, known amongst friends as ‘Old Taylor’, Taylor was affectionately known to Sickert as ‘my Taylor’. Sickert remarked the circumstances of their first encounter around 1906: ‘We first met when Taylor came to my studio and bought six pictures straight off. I thought I was made for life.’ He and Sickert occasionally holidayed together in Dieppe, and in 1910 Taylor took a house in Bedford Square, Brighton. Marjorie Lilly, who met Sickert in 1917, gave a lively description of how Sickert would stay with Taylor in Brighton:

"The house at Brighton was a favourite week-end retreat for the Sickerts. Here, he and Taylor reversed their roles, Sickert assuming the part of host, planning the day for everyone, Taylor subsiding into the part of the accommodating guest. Up with the sparrows as usual, Sickert would return to breakfast after his early morning walk, saying, ‘I saw some delicious mushrooms at the greengrocer’s.’ ‘Oh,’ said Taylor and the mushrooms duly appeared at the next meal. Or, it might be after breakfast, when Sickert would choose a subject for his host to paint, usually from Taylor’s own balcony."

Sickert and Taylor’s friendship was especially close in 1915. That winter Sickert wrote to Ethel Sands and mentioned that he had a new neighbour near his studio at 15 Fitzroy Street: ‘Walter Taylor has taken a floor at No 18 Fitzroy Street. I have disgorged half my furniture on him and even lent him some of my most cherished bibelots for him to do still-lifes.’

It seems The Balcony was first offered for sale by the Leicester Galleries, and their label is affixed to the reverse of the panel. Sickert had a warm friendship with Oliver Brown, one of the Leicester Galleries’ directors, and he allowed the gallery to sell his work from the mid-twenties until his death. His first solo exhibition at the gallery, a large showing of his etchings and engravings, was held in 1925. There followed a retrospective exhibition in 1929 and exhibitions of his recent work in 1931, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940 and posthumously in 1942. The Balcony perhaps remained in Sickert’s possession until it was handled by the Leicester Galleries, most probably in the early thirties, and its first recorded owners were Herbert Henry and Isobel Marks who bought it in 1934. They lived in a house called Hoders on the private Woodhurst Park estate in Oxted, Surrey. (A hand-written label on the reverse identifies the picture as ‘Property of H. H. Marks Esq, Hoders, Oxted’.) Marks was a financier and chairman of his company the City & Colonial Finance Corporation Ltd. The family sold the painting at Bonhams in 2004 when it was bought by the art dealer Richard Green, whose label is affixed to the reverse of the panel. It was bought from Richard Green by a private individual. It is now owned by Piano Nobile.