‘What you see is a beautiful woman. But she is about to be separated from her lover, possibly for ever, by war’

In 1939, the British artist Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (1890-1978) packed his bags and fled with his mistress to the United States. The year had started out well with a highly prized commission from the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, but ended in scandal when his muse, Kathleen ‘Dorette’ Woodward, outed him in the press as her lover after he attempted to counter-sue his wife for adultery.

At the time, Brockhurst was the most popular portraitist in Britain, commanding 1,000 guineas a painting. His sitters were society beauties and movie stars: Merle Oberon, Marlene Dietrich, Simpson and the Duchess of Argyll (the notorious Margaret), who loved him for his highly polished representations of the feminine ideal. His women resembled Hitchcock heroines: beautiful, classy and remote, like Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps or Joan Fontaine in Suspicion — cyphers of men’s desires and obsessions.

One of the final paintings Brockhurst completed before he crossed the Atlantic was a picture of Yvonne MacDonald, heiress of a food and cattle-ranching fortune and something of a female James Bond — she flew planes and drove a Bugatti with élan. Yvonne was estranged from her husband, Kenneth MacDonald, and the commission was destined for her lover, the Danish aristocrat Curt Heinrich Ludwig Eberhard Erdmann Georg Greve Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, who was married to the American heiress Barbara Hutton.

Portrait of Yvonne MacDonald, née Norton-Bell, 1939, is offered in the British and European Art sale on 4 June 2024. It is, says Sarah Reynolds, Christie’s Head of Sale, an exceptional example of the artist’s work: ‘It has a truly psychological impact’.

Born in Birmingham in the West Midlands of England in 1890, the son of a coal agent, Brockhurst was a child prodigy who was admitted to the Birmingham School of Art at the age of 12. At 17 he moved to London to attend the Royal Academy Schools, where he won a travel scholarship to study the Old Masters in Italy. The experience left a profound impression him, and he resolved to bring Leonardo da Vinci’s obstinate rigour, smoothness of touch and playful creativity to modern art.

During the First World War he lived in Ireland with his French wife Anaïs and fell in with the Johns, the free-loving Augustus and Dorelia, whose bohemian lifestyle may have contributed to Brockhurst’s later notoriety. Returning to the UK, the artist found success as an etcher and became a visiting professor at the Royal Academy Schools. It was not until the early 1930s, with a slump in the etching market, that Brockhurst became better known as a portrait painter.

The artist had a hard-edged, brushless style, so smooth and glossy that the results could almost be mistaken for photographs. He achieved this flawless finish by using old-fashioned glazing techniques, layering thin, semi-translucent films of paint on top of one another. ‘Does he use real lipstick to paint their mouths?’ asked one visitor to an exhibition in 1937.

That play with illusion and reality led him to become associated with British Realism, an umbrella term for a group of modern artists who looked to painters of the past and sought to represent harmony and order in their work. Today these artists are little known: Dod Procter, Winifred Knights, Meredith Frampton, James Cowie. Yet in the inter-war years they were celebrated for their reserved, figurative style that rejected drama in favour of stillness and sense of reverie.

Wyndham Lewis considered British Realism to be the artistic version of the stiff upper-lip and derided its ‘safe and satisfactory’ representation of the world. Reynolds explains that the popularity of British Realism in the 1930s was in response to the darkening mood across Europe: ‘Britain was facing the possibility of another war and artists were finding refuge in images of a pre-modern, more secure time.’

The portrait of Yvonne MacDonald encompasses this desire. It depicts the sitter as the Mona Lisa, seated against a distant view of hills wearing a thick blue velvet dress — the colour of the cloak in Murillo’s Assumption of the Virgin, 1680. Her pale complexion, the low tones and the dream-like atmosphere echoes 15th-century Italian painters such as Antonello da Messina.

‘The portrait of Yvonne appears in a photograph of Brockhurst in his Chelsea studio,’ says Reynolds. ‘I think that shows just how important he considered the work to be.’

The specialist also notes that, for all the harmony the portrait possesses, there is an acute sense of psychological tension. Nothing is quite as it seems: ‘What you see is a beautiful woman. But she is about to be separated from her lover, possibly for ever, by war.’

Soon after the work was completed, MacDonald swapped high society for a life of danger and espionage. She drove ambulances and supplies to the front line, was one of the last to leave Paris in her effort to help civilians escape the advancing German army, and flew secret missions to Switzerland (much of her war work remains classified). ‘The story has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood thriller,’ says Reynolds.

Brockhurst’s life was also in turmoil. Like Augustus John, his domestic arrangements had been sexually munificent — he had slept with his wife’s sister, among other women. When he met the 16-year-old life-model, Kathleen ‘Dorette’ Woodward, at the Royal Academy Schools in 1928, it was the start of an obsessive and tempestuous relationship — one so fraught he once attacked a portrait of her with a knife. ‘All that passion is so different to the cool reserve he depicted on canvas,’ says Reynolds.

In the United States, the couple established a successful career as artist and muse. In a culture heavily invested in feminine iconography, Brockhurst’s flawless paintings tapped into the desire for Hollywood gloss, and Dorette’s immaculate features were the perfect advert. He had little trouble securing commissions from the moneyed elite, including the Gettys. He married Dorette in 1947, and died a rich man in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, in 1978.

MacDonald’s relationship with Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Reventlow did not survive the war. He went on to marry an Astor in 1942. Like many war heroes, MacDonald rarely spoke about her exploits, and lived out her life quietly in the Highlands of Scotland. The only testament to her thrilling career was a small war-time chronicle, titled Red Tape Not Withstanding.

Reynolds says there has been a revival of interest in British Realism recently. The 2017 exhibition True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art introduced a new generation to the strange, somewhat surreal world of naturalism between the wars.

‘I think that forensic style of painting, so smooth and glossy, speaks to a younger generation who are very literate in social media,’ the specialist says. ‘The recent London theatre production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring Sarah Snook in which she manipulated her image on stage using digital media is not unlike what the artists of British Realism were doing a century ago — taking art from the past and updating it for the modern age.’