Textile designer and art therapist Elisabeth Tomalin once observed that ‘the only joy in life is being creative. Everything else is more or less pain’. Her untitled flowerpiece shows a remarkable freedom and command of colour. A German-Jewish refugee from Nazism, she studied at the progressive Reimann Schule in Berlin, developing her distinctive approach to colour, before later settling in Britain. Postwar she headed the new textile print department at Marks and Spencers, designing fabrics for colourful 'New Look' dresses for the masses, and later working as a colour consultant at Heals. In her sixties, she retrained as an art therapist in New York, holding seminars in Germany, Switzerland and Austria until her mid-nineties.