Clare Winsten (née Clara Birnberg) emigrated from Romania to England in 1902, where she trained at The Slade School of Fine Art (1910–12). Gaining recognition within the circle of Jewish painters emerging at the time, she was the only female member of the so-called Whitechapel Boys. As a portraitist, she made drawings of numerous eminent figures, including George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Britten and Mahatma Gandhi. She also illustrated several books, such as Shaw’s Buoyant Billions: A Comedy of No Manners in Prose, published in 1949.

Winsten joined the Women’s Freedom League and became active in women’s suffrage soon after leaving the Slade. A female artist and pacifist working during a particularly turbulent time in English history, her work came to reflect the notional gulf between the forward movement of emerging modernist art and the traditionalism at the heart of the war effort and society at the time.

With thanks to artbiogs.co.uk

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