Woman Seated at a Window is a canonical example of Sickert’s Camden Town period. It was included in Southampton City Art Gallery’s important Festival of Britain exhibition, The Camden Town Group (1951), and displays the complex painterly qualities and troubled emotion of the figure work he made between 1906 and 1914. The Camden Town nudes of Sickert exhibit a variety of moods ranging from the grotesque to the erotic. Many contain an element of threat, a subject adopted later on by Francis Bacon who in fact owned a comparable work by Sickert, Granby Street (c. 1912–13, Private Collection). In Woman Seated at a Window, the artist’s model is mostly clothed and adopts a thoughtful posture. Unlike his more frankly sexual works such as La Hollandaise (c. 1906, Tate Collection) and Mornington Crescent Nude (c. 1907, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), the painting explores the intimacy of a private moment. Sitting alone, the woman turns to one side in the darkened room and gazes through the window. Unlike Sickert’s paintings of recumbent prostitutes, this work and others like it show the compassionate side to the artist’s nature. Though Sickert started acquiring London studios in 1905, at one time having possession of three at once, it was not until 1906 that he started to re-establish himself in the London art world after his years abroad in France and Italy. Woman Seated at a Window was most likely executed at 6 Mornington Crescent. The double-banded pattern of the balcony railing outside the window, also visible in Little Rachel (1907, Tate Collection), is a telling detail in respect to location. Moreover, in the summer of 1907 the artist wrote to his friend Nan Hudson, ‘This is to tell you I have got entangled in a batch of a dozen or so interiors on the first floor here. A typical lodgings first-floor.’ He considered this batch important enough to postpone his annual visit to Dieppe. Woman Seated at a Window was plausibly one of that ‘dozen or so’ pictures executed at Mornington Crescent. The work was first gifted by Sickert to his friend the painter Sylvia Gosse. They met in Sickert’s art school at Rowlandson House where Gosse was a student and remained close friends until the end of Sickert’s life in 1942. Among the other fine gifts that she received from Sickert was Café des Tribunaux, Dieppe (c. 1890, Tate Collection).