The Old Bedford was one of Sickert’s favoured music halls in the early part of his career. He painted performers and audiences alike there in the late 1880s and 1890s. It was demolished in 1898 to be replaced by a larger, grander venue – the New Bedford Palace of Varieties – which opened in 1899 and which he returned to as a subject in 1907. He made a number of paintings of the New Bedford, the most significant of which were commissioned from him in 1915 by his great friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson. They wanted mural-like decorations for the dining room of their new house at 15 Vale Avenue, Chelsea. Sickert acquiesced to their commission, evidently attracted by the idea of painting one of his favourite music-hall haunts. At an early stage of his preparations, he made a loose study which shows much of the theatre’s auditorium (fig. 1); Richard Shone has suggested that this was a modello from which sections were extrapolated and expanded to make the full-scale decorative panels. However, the project was of an unusually large scale for Sickert. In January 1915 he wrote to Sands and Hudson, ‘Bedford Bedford Bedford every bloody night’. The purpose of his visits there was to make sketches which contributed to the design of three large-scale paintings, of which Piano Nobile’s painting is one. The second is in a private collection in London (fig. 2) and the whereabouts of the third is unknown. The three works were probably intended to form a tableau, filling the overmantel above the fireplace and flanking the chimney breast on either side: Piano Nobile’s painting would have hung on the left-hand side of the chimney breast, while the lesser height of figure 2 indicates that it would have hung in the smaller space above the mantelshelf. Piano Nobile’s New Bedford depicts the stage box at gallery level, including the massive gilt and stucco caryatid figure which flanks the box on its left. (The right-hand side caryatid is pictured in fig. 2.) The dynamic contrapposto of the architectural figure – its arms raised, its right elbow crooked, its hips tilted – provides a compositional focus in the painting. By contrast with this writhing but static figure, members of the audience in the box are curiously inert; they are absorbed in the performance taking place on stage below. Sickert’s many paintings of theatre audiences began at the Old Bedford in the 1890s and followed from an initial interest in the performers on stage. The subject-matter was suggested to Sickert by the work of his mentor, Edgar Degas, who had painted theatre audiences in the 1870s. For various reasons, the commission was never delivered. As Wendy Baron has noted, ‘Ethel Sands did not acquire Sickert’s finished canvases.’ In his authoritative biography of Sickert, Matthew Sturgis suggested that in 1915 Sickert’s burgeoning interest in etching and his printing press at Red Lion Square drew his attention away from the New Bedford commission. ‘Ethel’s dining-room canvases were left, unworked on, at the distant Brecknock Road studio [in Tufnell Park].’ When Sickert returned to the scheme in 1918, Sands expressed wariness in a letter to Nan: ‘He promises to do our panels for the dining-room now but I have no faith.’ As Baron notes, ‘her pessimism was well-founded.’ The project was left incomplete. It is unclear how close to completion The New Bedford was when Sickert stopped working on it. The composition is fully resolved, though it is perhaps awaiting a final layer of paint. The dazzling lightness of touch apparent in the tempera (an egg-based medium, finer than oil paint) has been praised for its ‘painterly freedom’. The facility evident in this painting shows Sickert’s skilful dexterity at the time, while the looseness and compelling granularity of the execution is accounted for by the nature of such a large decorative mural. Sickert’s work has long been revered and collected by impresarios of theatre and film. (Though his own career as a professional actor ended before his twenty-second birthday, he was a life-long amateur thespian, performing to acquaintances and at parties.) For many years, The New Bedford was owned by the actor Vincent Price. Famed for his leathery baritone and pencil moustache, he made a career of playing sinister villains in horror movies. He was also a voracious art collector, donating around 2,000 works to the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College over his lifetime. The New Bedford remained in his collection until his death.