Welsh painter and lithographer Count Albert de Belleroche was BOTD in 1864. Born in Swansea, the son of the Marquis de Belleroche, he inherited his father’s title aged three following his father’s death. He and his family moved to Paris, where his mother remarried. After completing his schooling, he studied oil painting with the artist Carolus-Duran. His aristocratic status and independent wealth relieved him of the need to seek commissions, allowing him to select the subjects for his portrait work, including Henri di Toulouse-Lautrec, Japanese wrestler Taro Miyake, painter Victorine Meurent, dancer and spy Mata Hari and acrobat Cha-U-Kao. He befriended most of the leading artists and intellectuals of his generation, including Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Albert Moore, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. He developed an intimate, erotically-charged friendship with the painter John Singer Sargent, who became a major influence on his development as an artist. Biographers continue to debate the exact nature of their relationship, though they are widely assumed to have been lovers. The 1895 trial and conviction of Wilde for gross indecency appears to have driven Belleroche into the closet, breaking off his friendship with Sargent, taking a studio in the seedy Montmartre district of Paris, and beginning an affair with artist’s model Lil Grenier. He transitioned from oil painting to lithographs, becoming a founding member of the Salon d’Automne, and exhibited his work in the group’s 1904 exhibition. After breaking off with Grenier in 1910, he married Julie Visseaux, the daughter of his sculptor friend Édouard Visseaux, a woman 17 years his junior. They relocated to England soon after their marriage, settling in London and having three children together. During World War One, they relocated to Rustington on the Sussex Coast, returning to London after the war. His artistic output appeared to have declined after the war. In 1933, his lithographs were the subject of a retrospective at the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels, where he was appointed a Chevalier de l’Order de Leopold from King Albert I. During World War Two, their London home was destroyed by bombing, and the family moved to Southwell in Nottinghamshire, where Belleroche died in 1944, aged 79.