Mead was about 32 years old when she painted this self portrait. Above a slender neck, the head radiates gentle authority. Here is a sensitive, questioning presence without arrogance. The picture is composed of broad brushstrokes of mostly understated colours. There is a swathe of orange around her left eye, a purple patch above and at the top of her forehead. Around the bottom of the neck is a zigzagging grey brushstroke, its genesis still clear to the eye. A sense of overall structure (what Bomberg called ‘the spirit in the mass’) predominates. Andrew Forge wrote to Borchard: ‘May I bring a painter friend, Dorothy Mead, who expressed a great desire to see your collection as she had heard about it from other artists?’ Mead followed Bomberg as a student to the City Literary Institute in London, and then to the Borough Polytechnic.