The prints specialist Ruth Bromberg identified this drawing as the only preparatory work that relates to Sickert’s etching of The Rasher, which was completed no later than 1922. The setting for The Rasher was ‘Whistler’s old studio’ at 8 Fitzroy Street, which Sickert moved into in August 1915. When exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1925 and 1941, The Rasher was given the subtitle ‘Whistler’s studio and Duncan Grant’s’ and the plate itself is inscribed over the kettle at the lower right-hand corner, ‘Whistler’s studio’. Whistler took the studio in March 1896, and Grant took over from Sickert in 1920; it was destroyed by bombing in 1940.

A woman is leaning forward over a gas-fired hob. The title, ‘The Rasher’, suggests she is frying a rasher of bacon. The drawing was studied from life in Fitzroy Street, and the etching did not follow until years later by which time Sickert had vacated the address. The print dealer Colnaghi received an impression of the unlettered first state of The Rasher in 1922. Food, ingredients and cooking were matters of special interest to Sickert, and he was well accommodated at 8 Fitzroy Street: ‘There was a huge cooking stove in one corner, for Sickert fancied himself as cook, particularly in a white chef’s hat and apron’, Emmons wrote. Osbert Sitwell thought Sickert cooked ‘surprisingly well for an amateur’.