由于她的朋友们，特别是爱泼斯坦、德兰、贾科梅蒂、毕加索和培根多次将她作为他们的艺术创作的主题，伊莎贝尔•罗斯特霍恩作为巴黎和伦敦先锋派核心人物的绘画生涯反而显得黯然失色了。这位先锋画家从20世纪30年代初开始展出自己的作品，40年代影响巨大，60年代广为人知，但在她的晚年，贾科梅蒂和培根撰写的轰动一时的传记使她成了**的缪斯。Rawsthorne的作品现在被各大收藏机构收藏，这本插图精美的书重新书写了战前和战后的艺术史，因为她也是这段历史的一部分：通过20世纪的动荡以及她与其中的几位最迷人的人物的奇异关系讲述了这段历史。Isabel Rawsthorne’s painting career at the centre of the Parisian and London avantgardes was eclipsed by the many occasions on which her friends made her the subject of their art, notably Epstein, Derain, Giacometti, Picasso and Bacon. This pioneering painter exhibited from the early 1930s, was influential in the 1940s and well known in the 1960s, but in her later years Giacometti’s and Bacon’s blockbuster biographies made her famous as a muse. Rawsthorne’s work is now in major collections, and this beautifully illustrated book re-writes the pre- and post-war art history of which she was a part: it is traced through the upheavals of the 20th century and her singular relationships with some of its most fascinating figures.

A decade of research into the period, Rawsthorne’s art and archives, and the memories of friends, has revealed for the first time her role in a rebel group at Liverpool School of Art; success and tragedy in the 1930s when she was studio assistant to Jacob Epstein; her life-long collaborations with Alberto Giacometti; and, after the war, with Francis Bacon and with African Modernism in the 1960s, as well as her exceptional late work. It also tells the full story of her break from art during the second world war, when she worked for the government in black propaganda.