Walter Richard Sickert

The title of Sickert’s painting, L’Américaine, refers not to the nationality of the sitter but to her distinctive ‘American Sailor’ hat, a flat-crowned straw boater which was commonly worn during the Edwardian period and was a characteristic feature of the costume of the female London street-sellers known as costermongers. It is one of a number of images by the artist dating from 1908–11 which depict one or more models wearing this particular type of hat. In a letter to Mrs Hugh Hammersley, speculatively dated December 1907, Sickert wrote that he was currently working from ‘two coster girls in the hats called “American sailors” between whom my progress is as transparent & embarrassed as Garrick’s between the two muses’.1 The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1909 as The American Sailor Hat, but by the time it was shown at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1925 it had acquired the more misleading label, L’Américaine. This perhaps reflects a tendency by Sickert to bestow French titles suggestive of nationality upon pictures of anonymous women, for example, La Jolie Veneitienne 1903–4 (private collection),2 La Belle Sicilienne c.1905 (David Fullen),3 La Belle Rousse 1905 (private collection),4 Les Petites Belges 1906 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),5 The Belgian Cocotte 1906 (Arts Council Collection, London),6 and La Hollandaise c.1906 (Tate T03548).

A sketch of L’Américaine appears in an undated letter to his friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson in which Sickert reported that he was:

In the same letter the artist described the second picture as featuring another costerwoman ‘in the sumptuous poverty of their class, sham velvet &c. They always wearing for every day [not] dirty, old, worn clothes but Sunday clothes. La [...] perpetuellement en dimanche. Le dénouement de parade.’8 This latter work can be identified as The New Home 1908 (fig.1).9 The art historian Wendy Baron has also listed a series of three further oil paintings and several drawings which feature one or more women wearing the ubiquitous straw hat.10 One charcoal sketch, exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in 1911 as The American Sailor Hat, relates directly to the composition of L’Américaine.11 It shows the same model in a similar pose with her left hand under her chin, although in this instance she is turned in profile to the far right. An annotated copy of the Carfax catalogue in the Tate Archive includes an inscription by the entry for this drawing which reads ‘Sally Waters green char[coal]’.12 This could indicate the name of the model, or may simply recall a further image by Sickert, a lithograph entitled Little Sally Waters 1907, published in a quarterly magazine, the Neolith, in May 1908.13 See also the discussion related to a drawing by a follower of Sickert, The Straw Hat (Tate N05309).