Literature: Hausberg 127 VIII/XI.
Hausberg recorded only three known impressions of the 8th state.
According to Agnes Ethel Mackay, the first state of this print "was etched from nature – from the parade along the seafront at St. Leonards-on-Sea", a coastal town in East Sussex where the artist had been living since the beginning of World War I with his second wife Ethel Croall Melville, who was ill with tuberculosis (Hausber, pp. 8-9, 149). "This subject, with a little girl knitting on her mother's or nurse's lap at the seaside, is reminiscent of Roussel's Chelsea period, when he depicted children in charming attitudes in a number of etchings" (Ibid.).
After the death of Roussel's second wife in 1917, her niece Agnes Ethel Mackey moved to St. Leonards to take charge of the artist's household and keep him company in the last years of his life, helping him as studio assistant and sharing his interests in philosophy and chess (Hausberg, pp. 8-9).
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