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The artist, best known as a sculptor, witnessed operations and was allowed to sketch. In the finished paintings she concentrated on the intense but compassionate eyes of the surgeons and nurses, the movements of their hands and the grouping of figures around their patient. Her superb drawing of 'The Hands' is emphasised by the choice of a dominant, non-representational colour: yellow. Texture, achieved by scratching and scraping the pigment, suggests the surface of a sculpture.