Portrait Of Mrs Maxwell-Hyslop as a girl

03 November 2025

Bellmans are delighted to be offering a fine portrait by seminal artist and Slade School professor Henry Tonks. Having initially studied medicine, Tonks took evening classes at the Westminster School of Art in 1888 before exhibiting at the New English Art Club in 1891.

PORTRAIT OF MRS MAXWELL-HYSLOP AS A GIRL — Portrait Of Mrs Maxwell-Hyslop As A Girl £3,000-5,000

He absorbed the practices of a number of Impressionist artists and in particular James Abbott McNeill Whistler whose influence can be seen in the unsentimental directness of the present work. With her strong, almost defiant stare, Tonks imbues the sitter with a confidence beyond her years, the colours of her dress echoed by the pattern of the curtain beside her.

Tonks served in WWII, initially at a POW camp near Dorchester before serving at a Red Cross hospital in France, an ambulance unit in Italy and then as a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps. It was during this time that he recorded the horrific facial injuries with unstinting accuracy. In 1918 he was appointed an official war artist accompanying John Singer Sargent on the Western Front.

According to his biographer Lynda Morris "Tonks used his anatomical knowledge to teach life drawing as a swift and intelligent activity. He referred his students to old master drawings at the British Museum and taught his pupils to draw the model at the size it was seen, measured at arm's length (sight size), which enabled them continually to correct the drawing for themselves, against a physical object."

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