[1] She studied at the Liverpool College of Art, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London[4] and spent two years in the studio of the sculptor Jacob Epstein.

[6] She maintained connections to an alternative circle of representational artists including Francis Gruber and Peter Rose Pulham, as well as Balthus and Derain.

These inform the skeletal bird, fish and bat figures of her 1949 Hanover Gallery show, the haunting ape series, and her last, large Migration pictures.

She also studied this quality in Early Renaissance paintings, and in the evidence of the body itself, X-rays, skeletons, figures and animals she found in the countryside or drew in London Zoo.

[citation needed] From 1949, she and Bacon showcased their figurative brand of modern art at the Hanover Gallery, and she exhibited in group shows organised by the ICA and the British Council.

Over the next twenty years, she painted images of Fonteyn, Rudolph Nureyev, Antoinette Sibley and other dancers which developed a vivacious new language of movement.

During the late 1960s and '70s, the deaths of Giacometti and her third husband, Alan Rawsthorne, prompted her to refine these ideas in a set of ethereal double portraits juxtaposing living, dead and sculpted likenesses.

The extraordinary brushwork and relief effects developed over a life-time of drawing in close association with sculptors, was combined with a new potency of colour and epic scale.

Swathes of yellow evoke the deserts of pre-history and post-history, as well as the very immediate issue of the fields of oil seed rape that were appearing in the 1970s.

[15] In later life, widely read biographies of Giacometti and Bacon brought Rawsthorne fame as a model and muse,[16] but unfortunately had the effect of obscuring her main profession.

Rawsthorne's closest wartime friends appear to have been John Rayner (typographer, journalist and soldier (SOE), the photographer Joan Leigh Fermor (then Rayner), the Schiaparelli model Anna Phillips, and the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, but her social life encompassed many others including the poets Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (she shared working quarters with Thomas), Ian Fleming, and old friends from Paris, Peter Rose Pulham, Peter Watson (editor of the journal Horizon) and the spy Donald Maclean.

She socialised with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl and other intellectuals, and for a time lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the journal Les Temps Modernes.

[3]: 297  They moved to a thatched cottage in rural Essex with a purpose built studio, near friends such as the politician Tom Driberg, poet Randall Swingler, artists Michael Ayrton and Biddy and Roy Noakes; Bacon had a house not far away.

[3]: 286, 338  Apart from visits to London and Paris, Africa, Greece and Australia, and a short period in Cambridge (1972-3), she lived in the cottage for forty years - half of her life.