Walter Sickert was arguably the greatest British artist of the first half of the twentieth century. He had a profound effect on contemporaries serving as a bridge between the Impressionists in France and the Camden Town School painters in London. And was also profoundly admired by later figurative artists. Frank Auerbach, for example, championed Sickert, characterising him as 'an immensely experimental, abstract minded, inventive, systematising draughtsman.”

Sickert's approach to drawing was pragmatic and the results extremely varied. He was not afraid to experiment, just as in his writing he was not averse to changing his mind.

In the late 1880s Sickert began a major series of paintings of music halls and theatres, reflecting an interest in the subject that is to be found in the paintings of his friend, the great Impressionist, Edgar Degas.

The stage, the orchestra pit, the performers and the audience would swiftly become a central aspect of Sickert's subsequent work in both France and England.

In this beautiful drawing, from around 1920, and a very similar one in the Tate, Sickert presents a single performer, from an oblique angle and raised viewpoint, bathed in a circle of light.