Portraitist

Most Britishers think of art as a way to have their pictures taken. Portraitists have flourished in England ever since the Ger man Holbein, the Flemish Van Dyck came to make their everlasting fame & fortune at the British court. For 200 years Eng land has painted most of its own portraits, in good times even manages to export a surplus crop. Such British painters as Augustus John, Simon Elwes, Frank O. Salisbury, the late Anglicized Philip de Laszlo have reaped a golden harvest from U. S. tycoons and socialites anxious to show a good face to posterity.

Last week perhaps the most talented and highly priced of present-day British portraitists drew U. S. attention to himself.

In Pittsburgh short, suave, russet-haired Gerald L. (for Leslie) Brockhurst served on the jury for the 1939 Carnegie Inter national Exhibition. And in Manhattan two exhibitions of his work were opened which showed him equally proficient with brush, crayon, etcher's needle. At the Knoedler Galleries was a loan exhibition of his portraits and drawings. The Arthur Harlow Galleries showed the first complete exhibition of his etchings. With his projected English commissions canceled or postponed "for the duration," Artist Brockhurst, whose deafness kept him out of World War I, planned to paint portraits in the U. S. for at least the first part of World War II.

Artist Brockhurst's portraits have the bloom and precise brushwork of the Umbrian school of Italian painters. The figures are serene, meticulously painted against quiet-colored Tuscan landscapes of rolling hills, flowing water, umbrella pines. But posterity is in no danger of mistaking the nationality of his subjects. Brock-hurst's Americans are American, his English sitters unmistakably English. Suavest of his U. S. portraits is that of Mrs. Paul Mellon, the Vassar graduate and divorcee whom Banker Andrew's only son married in 1935.* His drawings and etchings show the same care for line and texture, have the finish of his commissioned work but more freedom.

Son of a Birmingham coal dealer, Artist Brockhurst was born in 1890. At twelve he entered the Birmingham School of Art, was soon hailed as "a young Botticelli," won prize after prize there and at the Royal Academy Schools in London. A smooth success from his first one-man show in 1915, Limner Brockhurst charges up to -L-2,000 for a full-length portrait, limits his commissions to -L-20,000 a year. His person is as meticulous as his painting. He has a horror of Bohemianism, would rather stain his Bond Street suits with paint than cover them up with a smock. A famed impersonator, he is seldom asked nowadays for his best trick: looking like Adolf Hitler.

*At Yale (1929) and Clare College, Cambridge, Paul Mellon read, wrote and rowed, decided on a literary career. Instead, his father got him into the Mellon National Bank. Last July he resigned as president and trustee of the National Gallery of Art at Washington (founded by Father Andrew) "because of business demands."

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