Brockhurst (Gerald Leslie)

one of many portraits of his first wife, Anaïs Mélisande Frolin, as a model to convey various characters or characteristics of femininity, deploying costumes, hairstyles and hats to this end, usually against more or less plain or very simple and distant backgrounds. Brockhurst (1890-1978) was raised Birmingham where he attended the Municipal School of Art from the age of 12, before progressing to the Royal Academy Schools in London, in 1907. He won a scholarship that allowed him to travel to France, where he met Anaïs, and then Italy, where he was hugely influenced by the Renaissance artists, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli and Leonardo. He became a notable portrait artist, and over the 1920s and ’30s fully developed his enormous talent as a printmaker,

etching on laid paper, from an edition of 106, 137 x 102 mm. (5 3/8 x 4 in), signed in pencil lower right, [Fletcher 50],