Background
Allan was born Eva Dorothy Allan in Millbrook, Southampton in 1892.
Allan was born Eva Dorothy Allan in Millbrook, Southampton in 1892.
After the war Allan trained as a domestic science teacher, then studied art at Westminster School of Art and from 1922 to 1925 at the Royal Academy of Arts. She was awarded a Landseer Scholarship in 1923 and won the Royal Academy"s Gold Medal in 1925.
In 1926 Allan went to Florence as a pupil of Libero Andreotti. She also studied under Eric Gill.
She continued researching and studying throughout her professional life, visiting Yugoslavia in 1933, Croatia (where she met Ivan Meštrović in Zagreb) in 1936, and after the war visited France to study Romanesque art and in 1954, Serbia and Yugoslavia to research Byzantine wall-painting.
In addition to her sculpting, she served in both the First and Second World Wars, eventually becoming a colonel in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and the first President of the ATS During World War I, she served with the Q.M.A.A.C. Education Significant works Allan was registered blind by 1974, and went deaf in later life. When she died on 31 January 1996 in Buckinghamshire, she was 103 years old.
She was an associate member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors from March 1938 until she resigned in 1941, but rejoined in 1945, and was made a Fellow in 1947. She was also a member of the "Sculptures and Memorials" organisation, which was founded in 1934 to support British sculptors working with local stones.