Costers were a common sight in fin de siècle London, vending fruit and vegetables from the kerbside. In William Nicholson’s series London Types, printed in 1898, a work titled Coster shows a long-faced, magenta-coated girl with a plumed hat. Like certain other artists of his generation, Nicholson and William Rothenstein among them, Sickert’s interest in costers was strictly limited to the female kind. After leaving behind Dieppe in 1905 and establishing himself in Camden Town, he painted them on several occasions – in this work and others such as L’Américaine (1908, Tate Collection) [Baron 349]. Though on another day these working girls might have posed in the nude for Sickert, their identity as costers derived from the workaday ‘Sunday best’ clothes and flamboyant headwear pictured here. Writing to Nan Hudson in early 1908, Sickert described a typical coster girl’s hat. ‘You know the trompe l’oeil hat all the coster girls wear here with a crown fitting the head inside and expanded outside to immense proportions. It is called an “American sailor” (hat).’ Made of straw and coated in tar, the ‘American sailor’ gained currency after the United States won its independence in the eighteenth century. Both women depicted in Mother and Daughter are wearing them.