Born in Bradford in January 1872, William Rothenstein was the son of a wealthy German-Jewish businessman who, a decade earlier, had moved with his wife to work in the Yorkshire textile industry. Exactly six years John’s senior, Rothenstein had gone to the Slade in 1888, where a fellow student recalled him as ‘brimful of vitality and formidable intelligence.’ He had been unimpressed by the school, however, which was then under the direction of the French artist Alphonse Legros, and he had gone to Paris to study at the Académie Julian instead.

In Paris Rothenstein met Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec and Lucien Pissarro, and enjoyed early success as an artist with works such as Parting at Morning (1891), now in the Tate collection. In 1893 however, he returned to England, and his brother, Albert, who was then studying at the Slade, introduced him to John and Orpen. Of the two, Rothenstein preferred John’s work, considering it to possess ‘more magic’. Rothenstein would later write that John’s talent and dynamism had helped ‘raise the standard of drawing among Slade students in dazzling fashion’.

Rothenstein would admit that John’s brilliance intimidated him: ‘I was shy, after seeing John’s brilliant nudes, of drawing in his company […]. John drew nudes as no one, I thought, had drawn them in England, and his drawings of heads were remarkably fine.’ Yet as Rothenstein’s portraits from this period reveal, he was a talented draughtsman in his own right, and his portrait of Thomas Hardy is particularly impressive. It is reproduced (in black and white) in the first volume of Rothenstein’s fascinating autobiography, Men and Memories (1931).