Refugee Woman

image: a ghostly portrait of a woman with a shawl over her head, one hand at her face.

Mary Kessell was a London born artist who studied at Clapham School of Art and the Central School, completing her art education just before the start of the Second World War. Adept at book illustration and mural painting, she was commissioned as an official war artist by the War Artists Advisory Committee to visit Germany in 1945 just as the war in Europe was ending. Kessell completed a series of drawings of refugees in Berlin and the traumatic scenes she witnessed in the aftermath of the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. Her skilled handling of charcoal, her chosen medium in most of the series, is evident in these two examples. The ghostly figure of 'Refugee Woman' is rendered with fluidity, in contrast to the thickly applied charcoal in the drawing of a single child. Both drawings convey a stark sense of suffering and isolation.

War Artists Advisory Committee commission

title

dated 1946