A Cambridge artist working for print
Brock grew up in Cambridge in a family whose four artist brothers worked in illustration. Their father, Edmund, was a specialist reader at Cambridge University Press. Henry studied at Cambridge School of Art and shared a studio with his elder brother Charles. He generally signed his work H. M. Brock, a name that should remain distinct from his brother’s C. E. Brock.
Book commissions ranged across classic and children’s fiction, while magazines including Punch brought a different audience. Advertising, drawings and watercolours formed further parts of his work. The University of Reading’s collection preserves around two thousand books associated with his illustration career, alongside drawings and ephemera. An 1898 signed work at the Art Gallery of South Australia records his use of pen, ink and watercolour.
Six pictures from the hare’s experience
H. Rider Haggard wrote The Mahatma and the Hare. The retained 1911 volume allocates six illustrations to Brock and six to W. T. Horton. Brock’s pictures belong to the animal’s recollection of people, dogs and pursuit, within a larger dream story given other visual forms by Horton.
A trapped fox lies near the ground among closely drawn trees as Giles approaches. Elsewhere, a hiding hare occupies the foreground while a line of men with guns crosses the field beyond. Position and distance make unequal power visible. The familiar sporting landscape becomes a place experienced by the creatures being pursued, joining the illustrations to the hare’s account of its first encounters with pain and death.
