Rosemary Rutherford (1912–72) trained at the Slade School of Art and exhibited at the New English Art Club prior to the Second World War. In 1940, aged 27, she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. She performed a variety of jobs: driving a mobile canteen round gun batteries on the east coast, and working as a nurse in the Royal Naval Hospitals at Chatham and Haslar (Gosport) and other RN auxiliary hospitals. She also obtained permission from the War Artists Advisory Committee to record her experience in her spare time, and her evocative wartime drawings include scenes of leisure on the beach, shipbuilding, and convalescing sailors.
Most of Rutherford’s drawings in the Museum’s collection relate to the activities of doctors, nurses and orderlies, and the everyday lives of convalescing sailors and officers. This powerful interpretation of an operating theatre, which shows orderlies carrying a patient through the door, employs an artistic language traditionally associated with representations of Jesus Christ’s descent from the cross.