As Sim Fine Art says, official war artists were overwhelmingly male; of the thirty-seven there was only one woman (Evelyn Dunbar, and she was restricted to ‘women’s subjects’). For others, the war spelled the end of their artistic careers. This is The Milliners, painted on the eve of war by Joyce Beer (1915-2006) who had been a promising student at the Slade School of Fine Art until war broke out, and her father advised her not to move with it to Oxford.