The present sheet can be related to a group of around a dozen gouache drawings on blue paper, each depicting single figures of women in contemporary dress, which were produced by Tissot as studies for his first London paintings in the early 1870’s. As Michael Wentworth has noted, ‘The novelty and charm of English life inspired a series of pictures with English subjects that achieved the greatest success as they appeared at the Royal Academy exhibitions in the first half of the decade and are still generally considered to be his finest works. The handful of gouache studies he made for some of them have perhaps an even greater sense of excitement. Poised between the immediacy of first-hand experience and total artistic control, the nine gouache studies known today are unique in his oeuvre and are surely to be considered his most important drawings in terms of both technique and artistic quality.'

A gouache study of a seated woman – apparently the same model - in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which is Also comparable is a more finished gouache drawing of the same model, standing and wearing an identical bonnet and cape, which appeared at auction in New York in 1989. The model for each of these drawings was Margaret Kennedy Freebody, who posed for several of Tissot’s Thames paintings of the early 1870’s.