Anna Zinkeisen (1901-1976)

Portrait painter and muralist, Anna Zinkeisen (1901-1976) won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools from Harrow School of Art, and in 1920 and 1921 she won the Landseer Award. She later worked for Wedgwood as a ceramics designer. With her sister Doris, Anna contributed murals to the passenger liners the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. She later specialised in pathological and clinical drawing and during the Second World War she worked in the mornings in the casualty ward at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, and painted in a disused operating theatre in the afternoons. In 1941, during World War II, Zinkeisen and her sister Doris Zinkeisen were both employed as war artists for the North West Europe Commission of the Joint War Organisation of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John. She worked both as painter and as a book illustrator. Her self-portrait and her painting of plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe are both exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (London). She exhibited extensively at the Royal Academy between 1921 - 1964 and the  Royal Scottish Academy between 1927 - 1944.