The Portraitist of the Imperial Durbar Frank Brooks occupies a specific, narrow niche in the history of British painting. He was not a theorist or a revolutionary, but a highly skilled observer of status and identity. His work carries the weight of a specific era, defined by the intersection of British colonial presence and the formal traditions of portraiture. To look at a Brooks portrait is to see the rigid social hierarchies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rendered with technical precision. His training began in Salisbury and continued in London, providing him with t…