Eileen Hendriks (née van Dyk) was the wife of a fellow artist Petrus Anton Hendriks. In 1937, Hendrik became the Director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Eloff met Eileen at an exhibition and they became friends . He sculpted her portrait in the same year as Hendriks had painted a portrait of Eloff. The original plaster is in the University of Pretoria Art Collection and was never cast in bronze.