Best known for his dimly lit interior scenes of nude and clothed women, Walter Sickert was the leader of an Edwardian avant-garde group known as the Camden Town painters. Sickert had studied in Paris, and this composition betrays the influence of Edgar Degas, whose technically and psychologically complex pictures Sickert admired. He discovered his models for the scene, the Belgian sisters Jeanne and Hélène Daurmont, on a London street when he overheard them asking a policeman for directions in French.

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