Elizabeth Ramsden trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art under Henry Moore in the late 1920s, where she met Cecil Collins. She had begun to exhibit, but following their marriage in 1931, his career took precedence. The couple lived in London, and also in Buckinghamshire, where they met Eric Gill and David Jones. During the late 1930s they became part of the community of artists at Dartington Hall. It was there, in March 1939, that Elizabeth Collins made her pencil and ink wash drawing of a fool.
The Dartington period, which lasted until 1945, was the most prolific of Elizabeth Collins's career. Her paintings of figures, in gouache, ink and watercolor, were sometimes mystical or folkloric fools, angels, magicians and princes. The dream like distortions of scale and strange juxtapositions recall the work of the Surrealists she met in the 1930s. The Collinses collaborated on a public commission in 1973, the decoration of a chapel in Chichester Cathedral. Following her husband's death in 1989, Collins moved into his studio and had two solo exhibitions in London, at the Albemarle Gallery 1989 and at England & Co 1996.
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