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 sensitive drawing evokes religious iconography. The two nurses tending a patient recall scenes of the descent of the Cross, while the overall composition recalls Christian altarpieces: the oblong, independent scene at the bottom is not unlike a predella.