Cooke has made some of the most fiercely original and moving self portraits in modern British art. In her late twenties, she painted this 1955 self portrait. A disquietingly intense female figure is seen against a greyish-yellowish background. The work has obsessive notes of shocking freshness within a cool, abstract composition. The dark top, the long, brown hair, the huge, staring eyes, bold red cheeks and reddened nose, are all most urgently seen and felt. The delicate flowery curtains and the glimpse of neighbouring houses anticipate her later rendering of what playwright Nell Dunn called Cooke’s ‘large rambling house with enormous wild garden’. Cooke said painting was ‘truly dying and coming alive every day.’ In a letter to Borchard, Cooke wrote of the collection’s small number of female artists: 'I am not a feminist but to have only 3 women painters out of 91 make [sic] rather poor odds so 21 gns it is.