Jeunesse Dorée
Gerald Leslie Brockhurst British
Subject Kathleen Nancy Woodward British
Not on view
Brockhurst celebrates the beauty of Kathleen Woodward, whom he had renamed Dorette (Gift). They met in the late nineteen twenties when she was a young model at the Royal Academy Schools and he a visiting professor, and she soon displaced his wife Anaïs at the center of his art. This pose echoes one established in "Ophelia," a painting of ca. 1937 that Brockhurst presented to the Academy as his diploma piece in 1938. In the print, a modern knit dress replaces the dark gown worn by Dorette in the painting, while the title "Jeunesse Dorée" (Golden Youth) erases any implied connection to Hamlet's doomed lover. Published in 1942, the print responds to changing circumstance–made after artist and model had moved to New York in 1939, and Brockhurst been granted a divorce in 1940. They would marry in 1947.
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