Town & Country Painter

"I don't flatter anyone," says British-born Portrait Painter Gerald Brockhurst, 59. "I just paint them in the best possible light." In Manhattan last week a show of 24 of his oils and portrait drawings shed Brockhurst's best light on 24 Americans, mostly socialites and businessmen.

Brockhurst painted his subjects, including Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, Mrs. William Hale Harkness and Manufacturer

Robert Wood Johnson (Johnson & Johnson), with the slick competence of an accomplished academician. He also endowed most of them with the typical seraphic Brockhurst expression: the clear, luminous eyes and smooth complexions that made him the favorite portraitist of well-heeled town & country Britons for nearly 25 years.

Young Botticelli. Brockhurst has had a taste for Florentine elegance since his schooldays. "The young Botticelli," his fellow art students called him. After "winning," as he says himself, "all the medals and scholarships the Royal Academy Schools in London award," he got his own studio; within a few years he established himself as Europe's most fashionable and highest-paid portraitist. In 1939, he left England to do a few commissions in the U.S., stayed on during World War II, finally became a U.S. citizen in 1949.

Brockhurst fees are a steep $4,000 to $10,000 (depending on size). He "limits" his output to about 20 portraits a year, sometimes politely refuses to do a face he doesn't like. But he never lacks for customers, never worries, at his prices, where his next paint & canvas are coming from.

For in-town clients such as the Astors, Harknesses and Phippses, he keeps a big antique-filled studio on Manhattan's upper West Side. Out-of-town customers are often entertained as guests, while he paints them, at his 23-room Georgian farmhouse near Franklin Lakes, N.J.

Lace & Medals. Three out of four Brockhurst paintings (an estimated 600) have been of women, although "women are much harder to paint because of their subtler, less clearly defined features." Unlike Britons, "American men are still embarrassed to commission their own portraits for their homes and families." Most Brockhurst portraits of U.S. males are for board rooms and offices.

The most difficult assignment of Brockhurst's career was his portrait of the

Duchess of Windsor, which was painted for the Duke in 1939. An average Brockhurst portrait takes about eight hour-and-a-quarter sittings, plus extra time for hands, backgrounds, diamonds, chiffon evening gowns, lace and medals. Because "she had an unusually mobile face and looked different every time she came to sit," it took Brockhurst twelve sittings to paint the Duchess.

Movie actresses have always given Portraitist Brockhurst a bad time. Merle Oberon was chronically late to sittings. Marlene Dietrich couldn't sit still, got bored after two or three sittings, so her portrait was left unfinished. The easiest person Brockhurst can imagine painting is John L. Lewis. "With his heavy dark eyebrows and face like a Pekingese, I could do him in three hours." But, so far, Lewis hasn't applied for a sitting.

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