Eileen Agar moved to England as a child and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and then in Paris. She held her first solo exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery, London, in 1933. During the 1930s she became a leading British exponent of Surrealism, participating in major international exhibitions and in 1936 was the only British woman to exhibit at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. She later embraced abstraction, exhibiting regularly with the WIAC from 1948-66 including serving on the selection and hanging committees. Her head of Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, far from monstrous, is suggestive of natural forms and found objects.