Dorothy Bassano was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland on 2 April 1918. Her father, Harry, was an art teacher. She attended evening classes at Liverpool College of Art while still at school. These continued when, following the death of her father, she left school to work in a department store. In 1940, shortly after the outbreak of war, she married Don Bradford, who worked for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. Her job in the publicity department of a department store came to an end because newspaper and magazine advertising was not available, so in 1942, she took a post with the art department of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), a wartime forerunner of the Arts Council. Dorothy moved to London, where she helped to organise exhibitions, catalogues and artists’ commissions at CEMA’s Belgrave Square headquarters. In the evenings, she attended life-drawing classes at the Central School of Art, run by Raymond Coxon, and at St Martin’s, by Ruskin Spear. The teaching of Spear, and, later, Maurice de Sausmarez at Leeds, was inspirational, but it was the opportunities provided by her work to attend a variety of concerts and ballet performances, observe performers at rehearsal and draw musicians and dancers which were crucial to her own development as an artist. She preferred to draw at rehearsals, where the repetition of musical passages and musicians’ gestures enabled her to define individual characteristics; the comments and discussions between performers to which she was privy also greatly enhanced her own love and understanding of the music. She claimed ‘Music is the most magical communication of the deepest feelings we have: it is utterly mysterious how it can go direct into someone’s inner being, across language and culture.’ She spent VE night helping to set up a design exhibition at the National Gallery, while crowds celebrated outside – she left CEMA and she and her husband were reunited in Liverpool. They raised a family and moved home, first to Leeds, and then to Ilkley, before returning to Formby, on Merseyside. Determined and singleminded, Dorothy continued drawing and painting energetically and began to exhibit her work. Her reputation, particularly as a painter of musicians and conductors, grew rapidly as she accepted an increasing number of invitations to observe and record musicians at work. In 1971 she was the official artist to the New Philharmonia Orchestra on tour in the US, and in 1975 she performed the same function for the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition. The musicians and groups portrayed by Bradford included Sir Charles Groves, Maxim Shostakovich, composer John McCabe, the countertenor James Bowman, pianist Rosalyn Tureck, lutenist Robert Spencer, Ida Carroll, principal of the then Northern School of Music, and the Amadeus and Allegri string quartets. There were also many drawings, made during rehearsals at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, of dancers, including Sir Frederick Ashton, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Sir Robert Helpmann. It often took many years before Bradford developed such drawings into paintings, and her choice of colours and size of image were always designed to illuminate the mood, tempo and character of the music. Bradford perceived many parallels between painting and music, not least the close connections between colour and sound. Although movement was all-important, she also understood that this included stillness, with the anticipation of movement implied. ‘My special concern,’ she said, ‘is with the relationships of human beings one to another and their activities and environment – seeking out the shapes, colours, forms, rhythms, images, etc which refer to the vital truths and laws underlying these complexities.’ As Groves perceptively observed, in all her drawings of his orchestra, individual players were immediately recognisable. Her favourite subjects were musicians, ballet dancers, and horses and riders; even pigeons swooping and fluttering about below her studio window gave rise to an impressive series of images. Bradford’s paintings and drawings were exhibited widely and her works are represented in many collections in the UK, USA, South Africa, Australia and Denmark. In 1980, her painting The Offering was commissioned for Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral in Hope Street. Dorothy Bradford died at the age of 90 on 17 June 2008, just days before her last exhibition was due to open at the Millennium Gallery.