12 Facts About Victorine Foot

Victorine Anne Foot was a British artist who worked in oils, watercolours and pastels.

Victorine Foot was born in Knowles Bank near Pembury in Kent and studied at the Central School of Art in London between 1938 and 1941.

Victorine Foot's duties included painting camouflage designs onto models of ships.

Whilst at the Camouflage Directorate, Victorine Foot drew and painted her colleagues at work, both at Leamington Spa and at the docks where they painted their camouflage schemes onto ships.

Victorine Foot submitted some of this work to the War Artists' Advisory Committee and had one painting, Camouflaging a Cruiser in Dock, purchased by the Committee in June 1943.

Victorine Foot studied at the Chelsea School of Art for a short time before she moved to Edinburgh where she married Eric Schilsky, an artist whom she had first met at the Camouflage Unit.

Schilsky was head of the School of Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art and Victorine Foot enrolled there, gaining her Diploma in 1949.

In 1949 Victorine Foot had her first solo exhibition at the Institute Francais in Edinburgh.

Victorine Foot went on to exhibit with the New English Art Club, the London Group, at the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy.

Victorine Foot taught for periods of time, at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1950 and 1951, and at Oxenfoord Castle School, in Midlothian, throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1994 Victorine Foot donated her sketches from Leamington Spa to the Imperial War Museum.

Works by Victorine Foot are held by Aberdeen Art Gallery and the Scottish Arts Council.