Wendela Boreel

The daughter of a Dutch diplomat, Jonkheer Boreel, and an American mother, Edith Margaret (née Ives), Boreel grew up in England and attended the Slade School of Fine Art.[1] Boreel's first interest at Slade was in drawing. She began attending evening classes at the Westminster Technical Institute where she was discovered by Sickert. He gave her access to a studio in Mornington Crescent where she began painting.[2]

Boreel's first solo exhibit was in 1919 at Walker's Gallery. She also held shows at the New English Art Club and as part of Frank Rutter’s Allied Artists’ Association and the London Group. However, her earliest successes were in etching and she was elected to the Royal Society of Etchers in 1923.

Boreel and her parents lived on Tite Street and she became friends with Frank Schuster and met John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edward Elgar, Siegfried Sassoon, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Roger Fry, Glyn Philpot and Martin Hardie.[2]

In 1919 Frank Schuster introduced Boreel to Leslie George Wylde (nicknamed Anzy), a cavalary officer who had lost a leg during the Gallipoli Campaign. Boreel and Wyle married and Schuster invited them to live in "the Hut", his country estate in Bray, Berkshire. Siegfried Sasson described Boreel as "delightful" and said she was "the only serious element" at Bray.[3] Boreel's etching of Sassoon is held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. When Schuster died in 1927 he left the estate to Wylde and Boreel.[4]

Wylde died in 1935 and Boreel moved to France. She escaped to the United States with her son at the onset of World War Two.[1] She returned to France after the war.

• Landscape in Nude, by Wendela Boreel