“Blood” is typical of Hendricks’ approach to painting. An ordinary man by the name of Mr Donald Formey is depicted in an eye-catching yet effortlessly styled outfit (checked bomber jacket, matching trousers, oversized aviator glasses and a denim hat), his expression placid and unfazed. According to an interview with Toronto dentist and art collector Dr Kenneth Montague, who owns the painting, Hendricks said the subject was one of his students at Connecticut College, where he was a professor of studio art, and he’s understood to have added a few of his own embellishments. “This young student would pose and I believe he had a jacket that had that harlequin pattern on it, but Barkley took artistic licence and doubled it, making it a pantsuit,” Montague said. “Then the props, holding the tambourine in his hands, might have been Barkley’s idea, but the kid was wearing that cap.”

Before Hendricks turned to painting, he was a photographer, and his oil and acrylic works were often inspired by images he took. “The portraits he is best known for usually started with a photograph, which he would take liberties from,” Mr Trevor Schoonmaker, a museum director and curator, told The New York Times last year. “But the sheer volume of photographs that he shot over the years indicate that he was thinking of three things – models for paintings, subjects for inspiration and third, he was also thinking of himself as a photographer.” Hendricks created “Afro Parisian Brothers” from a photograph he took in Paris in the 1970s. Their generous, pointy lapels, denim flares, compact afros and fitted vests are all styles reminiscent of the era, but according to art critic Mr Sebastian Smee, the suspended left arm of the taller figure in the painting harks back to the dandies of 17th-century Baroque portraiture.

Hendricks’s 1976 life-size portrait of “Steve”, a confident young man in white tailoring, accessorised with shades and a toothpick, featured on the cover of Artforum magazine in 2009 to tie in with The Birth Of Cool exhibition of his work. This style of portrait, in which the figures wear crisp white clothing in front of a matt white backdrop, was dubbed “limited palette” by Hendricks (his best known, “What’s Going On”, was one of the highlights of the Soul Of A Nation exhibition at Tate Modern in London in 2017). What was most striking about this particular painting wasn’t just the extensive use of white that contrasted with and illuminated the dark skin of the subject, but the sunglasses that he wore. “As an added note of audacity, [Hendricks] paints into the reflections of the mirrored sunglasses the figure is wearing two little cityscapes and what may be a miniature self-portrait of the artist himself at work,” the American art critic Mr Hilton Kramer observed in 1977. “It is all quite stunning.”

Hendricks made four paintings of Mr George Jules Taylor, a young, queer, jazz-loving student he met at Yale, and the pair remained friends until Taylor died in 1984. Hendricks admired Taylor’s style and often depicted him in his own clothes – except in one 1974 painting entitled “Family Jules”, where he reclines on a couch naked. This, Hendricks’ third painting of Taylor, was developed from a three-quarter length photograph of him in the same distinctive outfit: striped yellow T-shirt, leather biker jacket, wide-leg corduroy trousers, wide-brimmed black hat. The portrait is impressively true to the original snapshot, which features in the 2021 book Barkley L Hendricks: Photography, except here Taylor’s outfit is shown in full and his gaze, as with most of Hendricks’ figures, is directed coolly at the viewer.

Hendricks was a native of North Philadelphia, where the subject of this painting, Mr William Corbett, is also understood to be from. At the time, it was considered a particularly tough and crime-ridden area, which only enhances the portrait’s power. Hendricks believed he needed no special reason to paint people from his neighbourhood and his paintings should be taken at face value, rather than given superficial deeper meanings. But this portrait of Corbett in his peach-toned shearling-trimmed overcoat captures the beauty, softness, confidence and luxuriousness of black masculinity in a way that was revolutionary at the time.