[1] Le Cren was also an early teacher of Colin McCahon who, when she died, gifted her daughter Betty Curnow a set of paintings in commemoration of her mother and her influence on him at a young age.
As the mother of three children[4] Betty Curnow's time was limited but she was able to attend the Christchurch School of Art intermittently[5] studying under A.J.
Roe, the first person in New Zealand to use mezzotint, who gave Curnow, primarily a painter at the time, a life-long interest in graphic art.
[7] Artist and writer Vita Cochrane has described her as ‘wife, mother and intellectual’[5] The year after her marriage Betty Curnow became involved in sponsoring the left wing pacifist publication Woman Today.
It served as a meeting place for art activists like Rita Angus who shared the house with Bensemann for some time, along with regular visitors like Betty and Allen Curnow, Olivia Spencer Bower, Louise Henderson and poet Denis Glover.
In the catalogue of Angus's first retrospective art writer and curator Ron Brownson noted of the portrait, ‘Nothing represented is extraneous detail.
[19] As art writer Serina Bently commented, ‘Henderson’s portrait is stripped back, presenting an exotic and confident cosmopolitan woman with minimal attributes of flower, cigarette and shawl.
[4] Encouraged by recently emigrated Dutch printmaker Kees Hos,[21] Curnow herself was drawn to the medium noting, ‘I like the transparency of it and the clearness of the edge and surfaces.
Curnow now focussed on new printing techniques and in 1968 spent time in Wellington working in engraving and aquatint with John Drawbridge.