Jacqueline Morreau was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA on 18 October 1929. She attended Chouinard Art Institute, won a scholarship to Jepson Art Institute and briefly studied in France before she qualified as a medical illustrator in 1958. Throughout the 50s and 60s she focused primarily on drawing and printmaking. In 1972 she settled in London, where she took art classes in Camden and began to exhibit and to produce portfolios of prints with publishers including Paupers Press. Her drawings also appeared on book covers from the Women’s Press and Bloodaxe Books, and Scarecrow Press in the US. She held her first solo exhibition, ‘Drawn from Life’, at the Women’s Arts Alliance in London in 1978.
Morreau also advanced the feminist art movement in Britain by fighting the sexism restricting women’s access to exhibition spaces and by staging two touring exhibitions of figurative work by women artists: ‘Women’s Images of Men’ and ‘About Time’, co-curated with Catherine Elwes Pat Whiteread and Joyce Agee, which began at London’s ICA in 1980, and then toured internationally. She also promoted women artists in her work as a curator of the Wales Drawing Biennale and as a trustee of the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation. She is recorded at the British Library’s Artists’ Lives archive. Jacqueline Morreau died in London, England on 13 July 2016. Her work is in UK public collections including the Arts Council, the British Museum, and the V&A.
