Pamela Oven was born in 1903, although wanting to be an artist growing up she studied physiology at Oxford. She was secretary of the Byam Shaw School and whilst F.E. Jackson was teaching there she absorbed some of his lessons. The school closed during the war in 1940 and was reopened by Ovens and some of Jackson’s students after the war. Pamela Ovens only started painting after she had left the directorship of the Byam Shaw School in 1962. She died in 1985 following a road accident.

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This work is from an album of drawings consisting of portraits and figure studies.

J. G. P. Delaney writes 'drawing, Jackson insisted, was not an imitation of nature an illusion of outside appearances nor a representation of the outlines of things, but an intellectual exercise, an interpretation of nature. "In figurative drawing" he said in one of his lectures, "the intention of the artist is to make a kind of explanatory diagram of the object drawn". Elsewhere, he wrote that the object of drawing "as to give the sense of solid form by means of line". Line did the work in a drawing: shading assisted it. He would encourage his students to "feel round" the form as if they were insects crawling round its contours.'

(Reference: Dr J.G.P. Delaney, F. Ernest Jackson and his school, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2000, p. 14)

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