Walter Richard Sickert

The identity of the woman in this pastel has been a subject of complex speculation. In Sickert’s oil titled Mrs Barrett 1906 (private collection),1 what could be the same model – albeit looking perhaps somewhat younger – appears dressed like a coster-girl, with a large, wide-brimmed hat. On a postcard to his friend Elizabeth Swinton, Sickert inscribed a drawing of its composition, ‘Thursday afternoon. New model.’ 1906 (private collection).2 Unfortunately, he does not mention the sitter’s name. In her 1960 Sickert catalogue, Lillian Browse wrote that Mrs Barrett was Sickert’s one-time charlady, but after the catalogue’s publication Mrs Barrett’s daughter-in-law contacted her with a photograph, informing her that Mrs Barrett had been a dressmaker.3 The oil once belonged to Robert Emmons, as did another pastel of the same sitter, which in his lifetime was titled Blackmail. Mrs Barrett 1905 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).4 Seated in a chair, hand on chin, this is quite evidently the same sitter as in the Tate pastel, her hair parted and coiffed in exactly the same way. When Blackmail. Mrs Barrett was unframed, an old Bernheim label and another handwritten one gave the title as Popolana Veneziana, which can be translated as ‘Woman of the Venetian People’. This would seem to contradict the identification of the sitter as Mrs Barrett, unless she was Venetian.

Emmons knew Sickert only from 1927, when he enrolled in his art school at Highbury Place, Islington,5 long after any association Sickert would have had with Mrs Barrett. But as his biographer, in touch with many of Sickert’s circle as well as the artist himself, it is probable that he would have had some corroboration of the sitter’s name in the two works in his collection. In a letter to the Tate Gallery in 1958, Emmons confirmed that, ‘I always thought the sitter for Blackmail was Mrs Barrett’.6 As to Mrs Barrett’s profession, Emmons commented: