MILEIN COSMAN

"Creatures Great & Small"

December 1 - 23, 2011

Milein Cosman was born in Gotha in 1921 and brought up in Dusseldorf, came to Britain in 1939, attended the Slade School of Fine Art in wartime exile in Oxford, and soon established a reputation for insighful portraiture, capturing the essence of her subjects in a few swift lines. She is especially renowned for her portraits of musicians, her subjects encompassing some of the best-known names of the last seventy years, including Stravinsky, Furtwangler, Strauss, Menuhin, Ogdan and Britten. Cosman's work is in several leading British collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A in London, the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, and the Hunterian in Glasgow; she is also represented in many public and private collections abroad. Permanent exhibitions of her drawings and prints of musicians can be seen at the Wigmore Hall in London and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The animals in this exhibition were drawn between 1946 and 1970.