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Gerald Leslie Brockhurst20th century British Drawing - Les Deux Landaises (Evening)circa 1920
circa 1920
About the Item
Pencil on paper
Signed 'G.L. Brockhurst’ (lower right)
Drawn c.1920
Collections:
The Fine Art Society, London, 1981;
Mr & Mrs Alan Fortunoff, acquired from the above;
Private collection to 2019
Literature:
Stephen Wildman (et al), A Dream of Fair Women: An Exhibition of the Work of Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, R.A. (1890-1978): Painter and Etcher, exhibition catalogue, 1986, no. 49.
Exhibition:
London, The Fine Art Society, 1981;
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Birmingham, City Art Gallery and London, National Portrait Gallery, A Dream of Fair Women: An Exhibition of the Work of Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, R.A. (1890-1978): Painter and Etcher, 1986-87 1987, no. 49;
London, The Fine Art Society, Gerard Leslie Brockhurst, 2011, no.12.
This spectacular drawing was made by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst in around 1920, it depicts his wife Anaïs seated whilst her sister, Marguerite Folin, stands dressing her hair; the drawing was turned into an etching by Brockhurst in 1923. Brockhurst variously called the print ‘Les Deux Landaises’, the two girls from Landes, a reference to the area of South-West France which was the native region of Anaïs and her sister and ‘Evening’. The tender and intimate drawing demonstrates Brockhurst’s virtuosic handling of graphite and his self-conscious interest in a long tradition of depicting women at their toilet. Rendered minutely in etching, the print points to Brockhurst’s specific interest in Rembrandt, recalling, as it does, The Great Jewish Bride.
Brockhurst was born in Birmingham where, in 1901, he was registered at the Birmingham School of Art. He won a place at the Royal Academy Schools in 1907. At the Academy, among other awards, he won the gold medal and travelling scholarship which enabled him to visit Paris and Italy where he became enthralled by the art of fifteenth-century Italian painters, specifically the work of Piero della Francesca. Their influence was to be central to the evolution of his own artistic development. On 5 December 1911, in Chelsea, he married his first wife, Anaïs Folin whose distinctive features provided the inspiration for many of his early portraits. During the 1920s Brockhurst established himself first as a printmaker of outstanding virtuosity and second as one of the most original and successful portrait painters of his generation. Brockhurst produced a sequence of eerily unsettling images of the greatest icons of the decade including the Duchess of Windsor, Merle Oberon and J. Paul Getty.
This intensely worked drawing of Anaïs and her sister was made in preparation for an etching published in 1923. Brockhurst’s sheet shows him carefully building up the composition, deliberately densely drawing areas such as Anaïs’s hair and the concentrated expression of her sister, leaving other areas, such as the table and contents of the room only lightly suggested. These decisions are reflected and developed in the finished etching where, for example, the blank table of the drawing is cast into gradated shadow in the finished print. Brockhurst’s feathery touch and minutely layered hatching point to the enduring impact of studying fifteenth-century Italian art, in the present sheet the graphite is handled with the dexterity of metal point. This drawing belonged to the most considerable collectors of Brockhurst’s works in the late twentieth century, Alan and Helene Fortunoff.
- Creator:Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (1890 - 1978, English)
- Creation Year:circa 1920
- Dimensions:Height: 14.25 in (36.2 cm)Width: 11.5 in (29.21 cm)
- Medium:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:London, GB
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU150728412262
Gerald Leslie Brockhurst
(b Birmingham, 31 Oct. 1890; d Franklin Lakes, NJ, 4 May 1978). British-born painter and etcher who became an American citizen in 1949. Precociously gifted, an excellent draughtsman, and a fine craftsman, Brockhurst won several prizes at the Royal Academy Schools and went on to have a highly successful career as a society portraitist, first in Britain and then in the USA, where he settled in 1939, working in New York and New Jersey. He is best known for his portraits of glamorous women, painted in an eye-catching, dramatically lit, formally posed style similar to that later associated with Annigoni. As an etcher Brockhurst is remembered particularly for Adolescence (1932), a powerful study of a naked girl on the verge of womanhood staring broodingly into a mirror—one of the masterpieces of 20th-century printmaking.
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