William Brooker's early work had originally been indebted to Sickert and English anecdotal Impressionism. The 20th century brought with it new influences, primarily from France, and Brooker reacted to this during the 1950s when he appears to have changed his style and rejected the Camden Town and Euston Road traditions.

Writing in the preface to the artist's important 1968 one man exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons, Edwin Mullins commented 'suddenly formal compositions replaced genre, objects replaced people, an interior became a kind of laboratory, a cell, rather than a place to live in.

Then there is the rich fuzz of paint which drags light gently into shadow across the surface of the canvas, picking up as it go...