This boating scene is one of Sickert’s ‘English Echoes’, a series which he initiated in 1927 and continued until his final years. The composition for each picture was a transcribed illustration, usually taken from Victorian weeklies like the London Journal. Though the arrangement was overtly the work of another artist, Sickert’s adaptation of those monotone wood engravings was far from imitative. Gaudy colours and cursory drawing gave his nostalgic paintings an ambivalent sense of modernity. Writing in 1932, Helen Brook (later Lessore) sought to explain the motive for the series, making reference to the sparkle of mid-Victorian society. Needless to say, no one takes a keener or more sympathetic interest than Mr Sickert in the England of that day, a time just near enough to seem out of date and ridiculous to those who do not really know it, but full of glamour of its own when vividly set before one as it is by Mr Sickert, who finds a majestic grace in the swing of the crinoline, and opulence and self-satisfaction in the wealth of whisker and coloured waistcoat. The River is rich in both whiskers and waistcoats, to say nothing of top hats, bonnets, frock coats and parasols. The scene shows a party taking place on the top deck of a steamer ship. Despite the respectable clothing of the participants, an element of rowdiness is apparent with one partygoer standing precariously on the casing of the paddle wheel. The source for the painting is an image by John Gilbert, as Sickert indicated with an inscription at the bottom left-hand corner, though the precise print and its publication history has yet to be discovered.