Károly Brocky

Károly Brocky painted soft, graceful portraits and idealised figures, young women, mothers and children and nymphs, with delicate modelling and warm colour. He also painted miniatures on ivory.

He was born in Temesvár, then in Hungary and now Timișoara in Romania, in 1808, and was placed in a free drawing school in Vienna as a boy. After study in Paris he settled in London, where he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. There he painted portraits, including one of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and ideal subjects such as a series of the Four Seasons. He died in London in 1855.

Mother and Child and Lucy Ashton and Ravenswood Visiting Blind Alice, a scene from Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, show his taste for tender and literary themes.