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.

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.’

Sickert regarded drawings as ‘documents’, and he treated them as such. He annotated this work with colour notes: the skirts of the figure are marked 'navy blue'; the overcoat hanging on the wall behind her is marked 'deep' at the bottom and 'wall sh[ado]w.' above; the bed end is unclearly marked, possibly 'lake' (red). When complete, the drawing was overdrawn with a ruled transfer grid in red ink. Sickert’s friend Marjorie Lilly recalled that he ‘rather liked the squared-up effect because it emphasised the design’.