Painter, illustrator and costume designer Eva Aldbrook (nee Eva Mehl) was born into a Jewish family on 1 July 1925 in Hamburg, Germany and immigrated to the UK with her family in 1938. She attended Bunce Court - a progressive boarding school in Kent for Jewish refugee children. After training as a classical dancer (taking the name Eva Melova), she studied fashion and costume design under Muriel Pemberton at St. Martin's School of Art, becoming a highly successful fashion illustrator in the 1950s and 1960s, celebrated for her elegant, confident designs with commissions from fashion house Dior and publications including British Vogue, The Evening Standard and The Sunday Times. In later years she turned to portraiture and landscapes of the Tuscan countryside, where she spent some years running an olive farm with her husband, later returning to England. Eva Aldbrook died in Oakham, Rutland, in the East Midlands in 2020 at the age of 95.