Eileen Forrester Agar was a British painter and photographer associated with the surrealist movement, Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Agar moved to London with  her Scottish father and American mother, where, in 1911 she attended the Miles Ozzanes’s finishing school and took weekly classes at Byam Shaw Sch of Art.

In 1920, she attended Leon Underwood’s Brook Green School of Art and between 1922 and 1926, the Slade School of Fine Art where she studied (part time) under Professor Henry Tonks. In 1927 she met, and was photographed by, Cecil Beaton. In 1928 Agar moved to Paris with the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard, were she studied art and first met the Surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard.

In 1933 Agar had her first solo exhibition – a seven-year retrospective, at Bloomsbury Gallery (London) and, at the suggestion of Henry Moore, she joined the London Group. In 1934 she exhibited her first collages with the London Group (alongside Henry Moore) and spent the summer with Moore and his wife Irina Radetsky at Wittersham in Kent. In 1935 she met Paul Nash (through the graphic designer Ashley Havinden) who introduced her to the idea of the ‘found object’

In 1936, Roland Penrose, the English Surrealist painter, poet, collector and promoter of modern art and the writer Herbert Read – both of whom later (in 1946) co-founded of the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), They selected five of Agar’s works for their International Surrealist Exhibition which was held in June at the New Burlington Galleries, London. Agar’s works were exhibited alongside work by Picasso, Miró and Ernst. Attendance for the exhibition was in excess of 20,000. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, included Agar’s ‘Quadriga’ in their Fantastic Art, Dada & Surrealism exhibition.

Agar spent the summer of 1937 with Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Man Ray, Henry Moore and Irina Radetsky on The Fal River, Cornwall. In September she then travelled with Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Paul & Nusch Eluard and Paul Nash to the Hotel Vaste Horizon in Mougins to join Pablo Picasso and Man Ray. it was in Mougins that Agar was photographed by Lee Miller.

During the War Agar worked in a canteen in Savile Row. The British Surrealists has their first meeting in 1940 at the Barcelona Restaurant. Agar was included in their Surrealism Today exhibition at Zwemmer Gallery. In 1948 Agar appeared on the BBC TV programme The Eye of the Artist’.

In 1971 the Commonwealth Institute staged a retrospective exhibition for Agar and in 1977 she appeared (with George Melly, Roland Penrose, Conroy Maddox and Robert Melville) in a TV reconstruction of the British Surrealists (1940) Barcelona Restaurant meeting. In 1985 Agar modelled clothes by Issey Miyake for Lord Snowden and published her autobiography A Look at my Life in 1988.  Agar appeared in the Channel Four TV documentary Five Women Artists in 1989 and was elected Academician of the Royal Academy in 1990

Eileen Agar died on 17th November 1991 in London

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