Correspondence, diaries and writings of Eileen Agar and her husband Joseph Bard

This collection comprises diaries and personal documents, correspondence with family and friends, professional correspondence, notebooks, and writings, notably including early drafts of 'A Look at My Life', as well as books and printed ephemera, kept and collected by Eileen Agar. Accompanied by the diaries, correspondence, notebooks and writings of her husband, Joseph Bard (sometimes referred to as Josef Bard).

Eileen Agar was born in Buenos Aires on 1 Dec 1899 the second of three daughters born to a Scottish father and American mother. In 1911 she moved to London with her family to a house in Belgrave Square. Her formal training in art began in 1918 when she attended classes at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting. In 1920 she began studying under the sculptor, Leon Underwood, in his studio in Brook Green before being admitted to the Slade in 1921 and studying there on a part-time basis until 1924.

After leaving the Slade Agar married her fellow student, Robin Bartlett, and spent some time in France. In 1926 she met Joseph Bard who was to be her partner, and later husband, until his death in 1975. For the next few years Agar travelled in Europe with Bard, starting a friendship with Ezra Pound in Rapallo and studying under the Czech cubist, Frantisek Foltyn, in Paris.

In 1930 Agar and Bard moved to flats in Bramham Gardens, London, where they were to remain until 1957. In 1933 Agar held her first solo exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery and in 1936 exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition. She met the artist Paul Nash at Swanage in 1935 where they began a close artistic relationship (and later an affair) which was to have a profound impact on Agar's work.

Agar is principally known for her drawings, paintings, collages and objects although she also took a series of photographs in the 1930s of rocks in Ploumanache in Brittany and of a holiday at Mougins in the south of France with Picasso, Paul Éluard (with whom she had a brief affair) and Man Ray.

During the Second World War, Agar worked in a canteen in Savile Row and in 1940 married Joseph Bard. Following a stay in Tenerife in the early 1950s she began to produce a series of highly coloured and lyrical paintings, often drawing on themes from myth and nature. In 1971 a retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Commonwealth Institute in London.

Agar continued to paint through the 1980s, including a series of paintings of the Ploumanache Rocks in Brittany based on photographs taken in 1936, and also produced collages. In 1988 she published her autobiography 'A Look at My Life' which was followed by two successful commercial exhibitions, group shows and a television documentary, Five Women Painters (Channel 4, 1989). She died at her home in Melbury Road on 17 November 1991.