Atkinson’s few extant fascinating pictures seem freighted with more meaning than her mute biography can explain. There are several pictures OF her by her teacher Byam Shaw. One such picture, The Caged Bird (1907), Atkinson is a trapped governess freeing a bird from a cage. In another, The New Voice (1909), she is naked from the waist up sitting with the god Pan but harking John the Baptist, and in The Regatta (1910) she wears a flimsy, clinging dress as she punts a boat down a river. 

In Rex Vicat Cole's biography of Shaw (1932) there is a description of Atkinson: 'a beautiful sitter, one of his students […] Her natural charm, added to a gift for understanding what was in the artist's mind, as well as an admiration for his work, and sympathetic help, made her a valued friend and an ideal sitter.’ This reads now like a 1930s way of saying they might have been lovers; at least there seems to have been quite a lot going on between them. 

The title of our picture - which we have given it, for we cannot find the original (the picture may not have been exhibited and reportedly stayed in the Byam Shaw family) - references the painting by William Holman Hunt of the same title (1853), in which a ‘kept' woman in a gaudy dress realises her mistakes. In Atkinson’s picture, which may be a self portrait, she too is wearing a gaudy dress, dressed up with nowhere to go. The balcony rail entwined by a creeper and the bars of the window seem to cage her in. A sleepy cat is also trapped indoors. She is looking at the church across the street with it’s silhouetted stone cross and angels. The shop with the lit window is a picture dealer’s, representing a profession perhaps denied to her because of her sex, and the families in the busy street a life she cannot have.