Attributed to Philip Wilson Steer 1860-1942

Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London, 1973, no.4, illustrated, fig.5.

We are extremely grateful to Bruce Laughton for providing the following information:

I think that the painting of A Girl Sewing, which I have attributed to Steer and provisionally dated c.1887, quite likely represents Hettie Pettigrew, the eldest of three sisters who came to London from the West country with their mother in 1884. (see Bruce Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, pp.113-116, for a memoir by the youngest sister, Rose.) Wendy Baron, who had attributed this painting provisionally to Sickert until the false signature was removed, agreed with the identification of the model (see Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London, 1973 ed. only, no.4, fig.5, illustrated). In her memoir Rose Pettigrew gives the sisters' ages when they posed for Millais' painting An Idyll of 1845 (coll. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) as 12, 10 and 8 in 1884 when that picture was painted in 1884. Rose was the youngest. Hettie would therefore have been about 15 in 1887, and the model for this painting does resemble the eldest girl in the Millais. Her youngest sister, Rose, first posed for Steer the following year when she was about 12, according to her own account, and remained his principal model for a long time thereafter. It is quite conceivable that Steer might have painted the eldest sister on this occasion, as her age seems about right, although she more often posed for Whistler. Thereafter Rose became his regular model.

Bruce Laughton, Personal correspondence, 2004.