Eileen Agar treated the world as a box of materials. Shells, rocks, feathers, printed scraps and plaster casts all went into her pictures and objects, and she photographed the coastline as if it were already a sculpture. Her work sits inside British Surrealism, yet it is lighter in mood than much of the movement: more seaside than nightmare. That tone, and her habit of building images from things she found, make Eileen Agar a useful study for designers who work with collage, packaging, editorial illustration or moodboards.
Agar’s works are in copyright. No work by her is flagged public domain in the open-access collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art, so this guide describes her pictures in text only and never treats them as free to use. For cleared museum images you can study and download, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Eileen Agar?
Agar was born in Buenos Aires in 1899, to a Scottish father and an American mother, and was sent to school in England as a child. She trained in London, including part-time study at the Slade School of Fine Art in the early 1920s, and spent the late 1920s partly in Paris, where she met members of the Surrealist circle. Her lifelong partner was the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard.
In 1936 her work was selected for the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London. Britannica records that the organisers, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, chose three of her paintings and five of her objects. Agar herself did not describe herself as a Surrealist; the label came from the exhibition and the critics. By 1940 her work had appeared in Surrealist shows in Amsterdam, New York, Paris and Tokyo, according to Britannica.
The Second World War interrupted her output, but she worked steadily afterwards, painting, making collages and photographing into old age. She published an autobiography, A Look at My Life, in 1988, written with Andrew Lambirth, and was elected to the Royal Academy in 1990. She died in London in November 1991. A retrospective, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, was staged at Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2021.
What to look at in Eileen Agar’s work
Start with the material, not the subject. Agar’s pictures are built from parts that keep their own identity: a shell stays a shell, a printed engraving stays a printed engraving. The meaning comes from the way two or three of these parts are placed side by side. That is the core skill of collage, and it is the same skill a designer uses when combining a photograph, a texture and a type block on a poster.
Look next at scale. Agar liked to make small things monumental and large things toy-like. A pebble photographed close up becomes a cliff; a classical head becomes a hat stand for feathers. This scale play gives her work its humour, and it is a dependable device for packaging and social graphics, where an oversized object can stop a scrolling eye.
Then look at the edges. In her collages the cut or torn edge is part of the drawing. Paper outlines read like contour lines, and overlapping layers create shallow depth without perspective. She rarely hides the joins.
Finally, notice the palette in her painted work, which tends towards clear, decorative colour rather than the muddy tones often linked with Surrealism. Because her paintings are in copyright and not held as open-access images by the museums named above, no measured hex values are given here; if you want a starting palette from a cleared work, use the image colour picker on a public-domain scan.
Key works and where to see them
The Angel of Anarchy (Tate, dated 1936–40). A plaster head, cast from Joseph Bard’s head, wrapped and dressed in fabric, feathers and other materials. Tate holds the version Agar made after the original, shown in London in 1937, was lost after an exhibition in Amsterdam. For designers it is a study in covering a familiar form so thoroughly that it becomes a new character: the head is still legible, but the surface carries the meaning.
The Ploumanac’h photographs (1936). On a trip to Brittany in 1936, Agar photographed the granite rock formations at Ploumanac’h. Ian Walker’s essay in Tate Papers counts about seventy images, roughly six films, and Tate’s archive catalogues prints including one titled Bum and Thumb Rock, dated July 1936. She bought a Rolleiflex square-format camera in Brest for the trip, according to the same essay. The pictures find faces and bodies in stone, and she returned to them in paintings of the 1980s.
Work with Paul Nash at Swanage (mid-1930s). Agar met the painter Paul Nash in Dorset in the mid-1930s, and the two collected and photographed objects found on the shore. Walker’s Tate essay notes that one object they photographed found its way into Nash’s collage Swanage. For more on Nash’s side of this story, see our guide to Paul Nash.
Untitled Self-Portrait (Metropolitan Museum of Art, about 1949). The Met catalogues this painting under object number 909908; it is not flagged public domain, so it is described here and not reproduced.
Technique: collage, assemblage and the camera
Agar worked across painting, collage, assemblage and photography, and the techniques fed each other. Her photographs served as visual notes she could return to, sometimes decades later. Her objects took everyday or natural materials and recombined them, an approach Surrealists called the found object. Her collages joined printed matter, paint and drawing on one surface.
What links these techniques is selection. Agar’s skill lay in noticing: picking the rock that looked like a thumb, the engraving that could become a mask, the feather that could become hair. The making followed from the finding. Designers who build moodboards will recognise the method, and Agar shows how far it can be pushed into finished work.
She also used automatic methods, letting chance marks or textures suggest images. Britannica and later exhibition texts describe her moving in the postwar decades towards looser, more abstract painting while keeping the same playful vocabulary of shells, heads and plant forms.
Eileen Agar and the wider Surrealist circle
Agar was one of a small number of women in the 1936 London exhibition, and her work is often discussed alongside that of other women associated with Surrealism. Her friend the photographer Lee Miller photographed her in the late 1930s; our Lee Miller guide covers Miller’s own pictures. For a contrasting voice from the same movement, with a darker, more narrative tone, read our guide to Leonora Carrington.
Set side by side, the differences are useful. Carrington tells stories; Agar arranges things. Carrington builds worlds with figures; Agar builds images from objects. A designer can borrow either approach, but Agar’s is closer to the daily work of combining assets on a page.
How designers can borrow from Eileen Agar today
- Collect before you compose. Gather textures, scraps and objects first, photograph them, and let the combinations suggest the idea. Agar’s Ploumanac’h pictures show that a strong set of source images can feed work for years.
- Use the square. Her Rolleiflex produced square negatives. The square remains the native shape of album covers and many social feeds, and it rewards a single centred subject with plenty of surrounding texture.
- Shift scale on purpose. Photograph a small object close and present it as architecture, or shrink a large one into a pattern repeat. The surprise does the work of a headline.
- Keep the joins. Let cut edges, layers and shadows show. Visible construction gives collage-based branding and editorial art a handmade honesty.
- Dress a familiar form. Like The Angel of Anarchy, take a recognisable shape, such as a bottle, a head or a letterform, and cover it in new material so the surface tells the story.
- Keep it light. Agar’s humour is a reminder that Surrealist devices need not be sinister. Playful juxtaposition suits food, children’s and lifestyle brands.
For layout and hierarchy once your collage is assembled, our poster design principles guide covers the basics.
Copyright and image use
Agar died in 1991, so her works remain in copyright in the United Kingdom and in most other countries. They are not in the public domain in the US either. Use them for study and reference, and license any reproduction through the rights holder or the collection that owns the work. Learn from the method rather than copying the images.
Frequently asked questions
Was Eileen Agar a Surrealist?
Her work was shown in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London and in later Surrealist shows abroad, so she is usually grouped with British Surrealism. She herself resisted the label.
What is Eileen Agar’s Angel of Anarchy?
It is a sculpture held by Tate and dated 1936–40: a plaster head, cast from Joseph Bard’s head, covered in fabric, feathers and other materials. It replaced an earlier version that was lost after being shown abroad.
What did Eileen Agar photograph?
She is known for her 1936 photographs of the granite rocks at Ploumanac’h in Brittany, taken on a square-format Rolleiflex, as well as portraits and found objects on the English coast.
Can I use Eileen Agar’s images in my designs?
No, not without permission. Her work is in copyright. Study her methods of collage, found objects and scale, and apply them to your own photographs and materials.
