Walter Sickert's drawing style and choice of subject matter were highly controversial. He was fascinated by urban, populist subjects, which he sketched quickly in the street; in his studies of the Music Hall, he juxtaposed the partially-clothed female performers and the elaborately-dressed male spectators; and his drawings of nudes were of heavily distorted bodies in poverty-stricken domestic interiors rather than the traditional prettified, classically-posed figures.

These breaks with academic convention presented an urgent challenge to Establishment taste in late nineteenth-century Britain.

Early in his career Sickert adopted Degas's technique of building up paintings from drawings. Anna Gruetzner Robins's study of the drawings shows Sickert evolving a new technique to explore psychological and spatial relationships, and her analysis of the artist's early unpublished art criticism reveals the influence on his drawings of the Realist and Naturalist ideas of representation which Sickert had been introduced to by Degas and Whistler in the 1880s.

Extensively illustrated, Walter Sickert: Drawings presents a catalogue of many of the known drawings, and includes a photographic reproduction of the exhibition catalogues for the Carfax Gallery in 1911 and 1912. These unique documents, in which an unknown hand has sketched each picture against its entry, enable scholars to establish what the titles of the pictures were at the time of their first exhibition. Sickert frequently changed his titles.

The Carfax catalogues throw an intriguing light both on his initial intentions and on the impact of his titles on the reception of his work.