Evelyn Gibbs studied at the Liverpool School of Art (1922–26) and at the Royal College of Art (1926–29). 

Credited with making significant gains for women in art and academia, she was the second woman to win the Prix de Rome for Engraving (1929) and was elected an associate of the RE in the same year. 

In London, after returning from Rome in 1931, she taught at a school for handicapped children and later wrote The Teaching of Art in Schools, which was published in 1934 – the same year she was appointed lecturer at Goldsmiths College. 

She founded the Midland Group of Artists in 1943 after Goldsmiths was evacuated to Nottingham, and in that September was commissioned as an official war artist to record Women making Munitions, working in Blood Transfusion and in the Women’s Voluntary Service. Seven of the works made during this time are held in the Imperial War Museum in London. In 1945 she married Hugh Willatt, later Secretary- General of the Arts Council.

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