Signed and inscribed 'The Old Middlx/Rd St A.R.A. (lower left).
Literature: Baron 2006, 282.8
Provenance: with Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London;
Christie’s Sale, The Art of Design The Lex Aitken & Alfredo Bouret Gonzalez Collection, Sydney and Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, 39 Brook Street, Mayfair, 4 June 2014, London, South Kensington, lot 103.
This drawing is part of a series of sketches that
Sickert executed on the spot during performances in the Old Middlesex Music
Hall in Drury Lane, London, often called The Old Mo after the Old Mogul Tavern that
started it.[1] Five
sketched figures forming different areas of the theatre are scattered on the
paper. The woman on the left might be part of the audience; in the
middle, an outlined figure seems to be crashing cymbals; another musician on the right plays a wind instrument the gentleman with a moustache in the top right hand corner is perhaps another musician, as a third on the same side plays a wind instrument. The presence of a
female singer in the lower right hand corner makes this drawing different from most
of the artist's other studies, in which he only focused on one or two areas of the music hall at any one time; here, however, he covers the audience, orchestra pit and stage. Executed around 1906, at the
beginning of Sickert’s Camden Town period (1905 – 1914), it is possibly related
to both the painting and the print of the same name for which a preparatorydrawing features in our display [2]. Indeed, the same wind
instrument musician appears in both. A similar
study of musicians from the Old Middlesex orchestra pit was on the market in
2005.
£ 10,000.-
[1] The music hall started as the Mogul Saloon in 1847, becoming the Middlesex Music Hall a few years later. In 1911 the Old Middlesex was rebuilt and transformed into the New Middlesex Theatre of Varieties. Today it is replaced by the Gillian Lynne Theatre.
[2] The painting was executed in 1906, now in the The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB, Canada (Baron 2006, 282). The print was first published in 1907 (Bromberg 127). A large plate of the print was published in 1910 and a small one in 1914 (Bromberg 136, 158).