This masterly drawing is of the sultry ‘Dorette’, Brockhurst’s nickname for his muse and lover Kathleen Woodward, who modelled at the Royal Academy Schools in London where Brockhurst was a visiting professor. Brockhurst was still married to his first wife, Anaïs Mélisande Folin, when he started an affair with Woodward. He exhibited sensual pictures of her at every Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for six years from 1933-39, and there was quite a scandal. Leaving Anaïs, Brockhurst sailed to the US with Dorette in 1939.

Brockhurst’s social connections, racy reputation, modern style and evident skill with brush and pencil earned him high-profile commissions to paint famous and beautiful women on both sides of the Atlantic, including Marlene Dietrich in 1936, Merle Oberon in 1937, and Wallis Simpson in 1952 (her portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery).

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.