Alan Rawsthorne — © National Portrait Gallery, London. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery, London

Isabel Rawsthorne (1912–1992)

National Portrait Gallery, London

Painter and stage designer, born in London as Isabel Nicholas. She married in succession Sefton Delmer, foreign correspondent of the Daily Express; the conductor and composer Constant Lambert; and the composer Alan Rawsthorne. She attended Liverpool School of Art, then at 18 went to the Royal Academy Schools, in 1934 going to Paris to study at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She had modelled in London for the sculptor Jacob Epstein and in Paris she financed her studies by sitting for André Derain, the sculptor Giacometti and others. A striking Derain portrait of her is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; a later portrait by Francis Bacon is in the Tate Gallery. After World War II, during which she helped Delmer with his black propaganda work at Bletchley Park, she held an exhibition at Hanover Gallery, as a result of which the choreographer Frederick Ashton invited her to design the ballet Tiresias for Covent Garden.

Isabel Rawsthorne Rediscovered: The Poetry in Things

Defying expectations, Isabel Rawsthorne made a place for herself amongst contemporaries in early 20th-century visual art, ending up at the centre of the Paris avant-garde. Her ingenuity as an artists' model won her the freedom to paint, a vocation she would pursue for 75 years. A lifelong natural historian, Rawsthorne’s ephemeral images are informed by her observations of the language of gesture and movement, from her poetic depictions of animals to her embattled self-portraits. Guided by curator Carol Jacobi, discover artist Isabel Rawsthorne, 'a missing link of 20th-century art'.

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