Although Strevens painted many well-known personalities during his long career, among them Winston Churchill, young Princess Elizabeth, the English soprano Elizabeth Harwood and guitarists Julian Bream and Ida Presti,  (Ida Presti on You Tube) his favourite sitters  were always “women and children because they allowed him to express his essentially romantic and idealistic outlook on life...he strives to bring out the pleasant and flattering qualities that he sees in the sitter, qualities that may transcend physical reality” . (T. Zamparelli,  John Strevens)In 1947 his first major group portrait of the Meyer family won an honourable mention at the Paris Salon.

He always preferred to paint directly from the sitter, rather than from photographs given that the camera lens, as he put it, distorts and filters reality  in other ways. His daughter Bridget who, like many of his family and friends, posed for many portraits throughout her childhood, recalls how he would begin “by putting the sitter at his or her ease, on the look-out for some characteristic gesture or position that they would fall into when relaxed.  This he would map out in broad brush strokes, laying out the basic shape of the body, the oval of the face, the positioning of the hands which reveal so much of the character.  Progressing from broad generalities to details, from mid-tones to darks and finally to highlights, he worked with rapidity - essential if he was to capture the spirit and vitality of the sitter”.

A commissioned portrait of  Betsy Campbell,  daughter of a US officer, standing in her débutant’s gown outside Buckingham Palace, led to his first trip in the early 1960s, to the USA, accompanied by  his wife Julia and young daughter Bridget , to  undertake some other portraits for some of the NASA community in San Antonion and Houston, Texas.   He painted portrait commissions  on a “sale or return” basis, meaning he would happily withdraw or redo it in the unlikely event that the sitter or family were not satisfied.  He often mused about the “ordeal by relations” when he would show the portrait for the first time to the sitter and family .  On one occasion a portrait was unveiled at a party to reveal that sitter had changed her hair colour from brunette to blonde, although to Strevens’s relief, no one seemed to notice.   Even at 80 he still travelled to the USA with his brushes and gear.  His 1981 portrait of the young actress Laura Dern captures a fresh yet vulnerabile gaze which the director David Lynch was later to immortilize in film.