In 1916 and 1917, Walter Sickert was painting a café in Fitzrovia, run by Belgians for Belgians. Some of his most brilliantly colourful wartime works depict the café (or ‘Café Belge’ as Sickert occasionally referred to it). This painting is especially notable for its high-key palette of pastel orange, pink and green, which overlay a luminous ground coat of brilliant blue-grey paint. The picture was constructed using localised areas of paint, in most cases laid down directly onto the light ground. Sickert’s technical ingenuity lay in calculating the precise visual effect of how the ground colour and the surface colour would interact; in The Club Dance he struck a compromise between the visual euphony produced by contrasting bright colours, on one hand, and the flattening effect of using thinly applied rectangular areas of paint. (At other times during the First World War, Sickert applied paint in impasto with more gestural effects of brushwork.)