Walter Sickert

‘In the years after the war,’ according to an exhibition of Sickert’s prints in 1941, ‘occasional etchings were issued but in 1928, a music-hall subject engraved in an entirely different manner was published by the Leicester Galleries’. It was That Old-Fashioned Mother of Mine, which is the title of a song written in 1919. The performer Talbot O’Farrell is dressed in flamboyant evening wear, while his song expressed sentimental warmth for his mother’s less elaborate wares: ‘Though she wears no fine clothes, or no rich silken hose,/Still there’s something that makes her divine’. No drawings have been connected with either the print or a closely related painting [Baron 2006, no. 578]. The painting is often dated 1920 partly owing to the time of the song’s first publication and popularity, but it is stylistically close to paintings made in the late twenties. It is possible that the painting was made around the same time as this print. The hatching, applied evenly along vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes, was made using a ruler. It combines etching and engraving, and as recalled by Sickert’s dealer at the Leicester Galleries, Oliver Brown, ‘[h]e was inclined to use a burin [tool] in some of his later plates, in addition to the etching needle’.