Bio

Grace Pailthorpe was a British surrealist painter, surgeon and researcher in the field of psychology. She is considered to be one of the seminal artists who contributed to the birth of Psychorealism. She was born in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex as the only daughter among ten children, to parents who were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a strict and puritanical religious sect. She enrolled in the Royal College of Music in 1908 but soon decided to study medicine and by 1914 had qualified as a doctor at the Royal Victoria Infirmary. During World War I she served with distinction as a surgeon at military hospitals in Paris, London and Liverpool. Her artistic work pushed forward her investigation into the unconscious, linking her professional interests with her surrealist practice, which she saw as psychologically liberating. It led her to her pioneering work in the development of art therapy later in her life.