Walter Sickert

After the death of his wife Christine in October 1920, Sickert withdrew from Envermeu where they had lived together and settled for a time in Dieppe. At 22 rue Aguado, he made paintings, drawings and prints that clearly depict the same furnished room. It was filled by a bed with carved bedknobs and a large mirrored wardrobe (an armoire à glace), which was the departure point and a compositional lynchpin in several works. This presentation drawing was brought to an unusually high degree of finish. It has been worked up with dry watercolour, which was used to stain local details such as the bed end and the patterned wallpaper that frames either side of the doorway. The edges of the sheet have been ruled off in pencil to indicate the desired position of a mount. The scene is gently dramatic and shows a woman heavily dressed in a large overcoat and the eponymous ‘waterproof hat’. She is apparently inspecting her appearance in the mirror before departing. Sickert titled the related painting La Parisienne and a related drawing Lola [Baron 2006, no. 556, 556.2].

The armoire à glace appears in several other pictures that Sickert made at 22 rue Aguado. In a letter to his new patron W. H. Stephenson, Sickert described with novelistic detail the woman who is seated beside her mirrored wardrobe: ‘It is a sort of study à la Balzac. The little lower middle-class woman […] sitting by the wardrobe which is her idol and bank, so devised that the overweight of the mirror-door would bring the whole structure down on her if it were not temporarily held back by a wire hitched on an insecure nail in insecure plaster. But a devoted, unselfish, uncomplaining wife and mother, inefficient shopper and atrocious cook.’ The same room also appears in drawings and an etching of The New Tie.