Clare Winsten 1894-1989
Clare Winsten (nee Clara Birnberg) was an Anglo-Jewish artist, illustrator, portraitist and sculptor. After her marriage to the artist Stephen Weinstein, they changed their surname to Winsten and both became Quaker humanists.
Studying at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1910 and 1912 with Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg, she soon became the only female member of their Whitechapel Boys group of artists and poets, and was the only female exhibitor at the (1914) post-Impressionist exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in which this group played a major part.
Among her sculptures are one in the Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, and one of St. Joan in the garden of George Bernard Shaw's house in Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire, where Shaw and the Winstens were neighbours.
Winsten illustrated Shaws Buoyant Billions : A Comedy of No Manners in Prose (1949), and the posthumously published My dear Dorothea; a practical system of moral education for females, embodied in a letter to a young person of that sex (1956), written when he was 21. In addition to painting Shaw a number of times, Winsten also produced a bronze sculpture of him (1946), which, on his death, was given to the Shaw Theatre and then (when the theatre closed) to the Mayor of Camden. Winsten also drew portraits of Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten and Mahatma Gandhi.