The Comb

This heavily worked close-up view of a middle-aged woman dressing the wild mop of hair of a young girl was done specifically for publication in The New Age. The girl is gazing intently at her image in a mirror; the woman is concentrated on her task; the two are utterly absorbed in themselves and their interdependent activity. Because we know of two other drawings related to The Comb, we can follow the process whereby Sickert achieved so commanding and insistent an image expressly for publication. A lightly touched pencil drawing, In the Dressing Room, in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, was first exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in May 1912 with The Comb. The two figures, seen reversed through a mirror image, are set back from the surface. There is space between them, with the older woman leaning a little away from the girl. Their activity is relaxed. The other drawing related to The Comb is in Birmingham Art Gallery. Now known as Toilet at the Window, its original title when exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in May 1912 was The Ladies' Maid. Executed in pen and ink, pencil and wash, it moves in closer to the subject than In the Dressing Room. The woman (now hatless because she is an indoor servant, rather than a working-class cockney mum) is seen almost full length. The body language of the two figures implies that their relationship is more distant and formal. In the published drawing, we move in closer still. All the peripheral setting has been excluded to leave sufficient space only to contain the figures and explain their action; the figures themselves occupy the major proportion of the surface area. While the subject is the same in all three drawings, through cropping the image and thus adjusting the spatial relationships of his figures to each other and to their setting, Sickert created stories utterly different in mood and dramatic effect.

We are grateful to Wendy Baron for providing the above catalogue entry and the entries for lots 14-18 and 20-21. This and the following lots by Sickert will be included in the catalogue section of Wendy Baron's forthcoming monograph on the work of Walter Richard Sickert.