Eva Aldbrook was born into a Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany in 1925. Following the rise of Nazism, she immigrated to England with her family in 1938 to escape increasing antisemitism. In London Aldbrook first trained as a classical dancer before studying fashion and costume design, becoming a successful fashion illustrator in the 1950s and 1960s; she later turned to fine art, notable for her portraits, including of fellow émigrés, sketching until the very end of her life.
Painter, illustrator, and costume designer, Eva Aldbrook (née Mehl) was born into a bourgeois Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany on 1 July 1925. Her father was a Polish-born scientist and inventor and her mother, who worked in an art gallery, fostered Aldbrook’s love for art from an early age, taking both Aldbrook and her older sister Miriam, to galleries and museums.
Aldbrook was sent to England from Germany in 1938 to escape persecution following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933 and the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation. On arrival she was sent to Bunce Court, a progressive boarding school established in Kent for Jewish refugee children. Fortunately, Aldbrook’s parents escaped concentration camps in Germany and were able to escape to London in 1939. While at Bunce Court, Aldbrook met Alexander Urbach (he later anglicised his surname to Aldbrook), a Viennese refugee, whom she later married in 1946 at Golders Green’s Dunstan Road Synagogue. She also met cartoonist and musical humourist, Gerard Hoffnung, at school, whom she later described as ‘a very strong influence because he was a wonderful draughtsman’ (Eva Aldbrook Interview, Insiders Outsiders). She subsequently trained as a ballet dancer and danced until 1943 for the Anglo-Polish Ballet, performing under the name Eva Melova. Retiring from dancing, she studied fashion and costume design at St Martin’s School of Art in London under Muriel Pemberton and was employed during the war as a developer at Kodak, after which she worked as a costume designer for Nathan's Designs, designing for both theatre and ballet, and later as a freelance fashion artist. Celebrated for her elegant and confident designs which captured the essence of 1950s and 1960s fashion, Aldbrook received commissions from Dior and from publications including British Vogue, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times, and had a column in the Daily Express entitled ‘Day in Town with Eva’.
Aldbrook later studied painting at Camden Arts Centre where she served as Vice Chairman for 12 years. In 1975, she was appointed Vice-Chair of the Hampstead Artists Council and held her first solo show at the Camden Arts Centre. The art critic of the Jewish Chronicle, Peter Stone noted: ‘much pleasure can be got from her rich, fluent oil paintings of a pantiled farmhouse in Tuscany. Her portraits in charcoal and pastel vary in their ability to get a likeness’ (Stone 1975, p. 16). Aldbrook exhibited her oils and pastels at Camden again in 1985. Her portraits (including of Hampstead gallerist, Margaret Fisher and of painter, Oliver Gollancz), figure studies, interior and still lifes revealed Aldbrook’s ‘feeling for her subjects’ and ‘her confidence in handling structure and design’ (Fealdman 1985, p. 17). In 1989, she moved to Tuscany in Italy with her husband where the couple had a large olive farm and Aldbrook had a studio. She produced many works in Tuscany and exhibited her work locally. In 2002, the couple sold the farm and moved to Florence before returning to England to be near their family in 2006. Latterly, through her son Mark Aldbrook and his partner Robert Drake, her work was discovered by Gray M.C.A., a specialist dealer in fashion art, and her sketches were included in a 2014 exhibition about fashion illustration. From 2018 onwards Aldbrook's portraits featured in several Ben Uri exhibitions, including her drawing of Sigmund Nissel, former internee on the Isle of Man and later member of the Amadeus Quartet (founded by émigré musicians), included in Finchleystrasse, held at the German Embassy, London (2018-19), while her portrait of Anglo-Jewish playwright, Arnold Wesker, from Ben Uri's permanent collection, featured in Liberators: Twelve Extraordinary Women from the Ben Uri Collection (2019).
Aldbrook drew until the end of her life, producing around 50 sketches of her carers at her home in Stamford, Lincolnshire and, in her last week, she drew a sleeping resident of her care home. A versatile artist, her extensive output over many decades included fashion sketches, costume designs, charcoal and pastel life drawings, flowers paintings, scenes from her life in Tuscany, as well as portraits displaying a lively sense of characterisation (including of prominent cultural figures such as Henry Moore and Maria Callas). Eva Aldbrook died in Rutland, England in 2020 at the age of 95. In 2019 she was Interviewed and filmed in her home in Stamford for the Insiders/Outsiders project documenting the impact of the so-called Hitler émigrés on British visual culture. In 2020, a chapter about Aldbrook and her work was included in The Clothes on our Backs: How Refugees from Nazism Revitalised the British Fashion Trade by Anna Nyburg. After her death, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum dedicated the 2020 online exhibition Interned Artists: Ben Uri and the 80th Anniversary of Internment (which included her portrait of Nissel), to Aldbrook's memory. In the UK public domain her work is held in the Ben Uri Collection.
Eva Aldbrook in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eva Aldbrook]
Publications related to [Eva Aldbrook] in the Ben Uri Library