William Brooker belonged to the mainstream of those British artists in the post-war years, who consistently and almost uninterruptedly divided their professional lives between teaching in art colleges and painting in the studio. Art colleges in that age - one which must in retrospect seem particularly enlightened, in comparison with the straitened circumstances in which they are obliged to furnish quasi-vocational skills nowadays - looked upon private studio practice as an indispensable part of an artist's qualifications to teach.

Brooker's own studies had been interrupted by the war, and when he returned to college, his first works of the post-war years bore some resemblance to those of one of his principal teachers, Ruskin Spear, as well as those of the Grand Old Man of British painting in the '30's, Sickert. But the occasional vertiginous perspectives on urban scenes, or the hints of low life seen in shadowy light, soon gave way to more static, virtuoso exercises in organising the picture surface for apparently more conventional studio subjects, although the artist continued to cultivate the unusual, even dramatic, angle of view.

Early on, he had acquired the habit of continuous observation and drawing, always carrying a skecthbook with him, even at the serious committees which he was to attend in later life, as Principal at Wimbledon. He was completely at ease with the direct sketch, but he came increasingly to organise his paintings from the worked out, often actually squared up, drawings, rather than directly from the subject itself. In this he resembled Degas more than Sickert, and this practice supported his preference for the structural organisation and interplay of pattern - drawing in part on the examples of Vuillard and Matisse - rather than on capturing the essence of human narrative and the anecdotal interplay of figures in real life, which had been one of the concerns of the Camden Town Group. Portraits are extremely rare, and the model whom he painted seldom conveys a particular emotion.