Kathleen Browne is remembered as a gifted art teacher and talented artist. She was born in New Zealand in 1905. Her mother was an opera singer and her father a journalist. After completing studies at Canterbury College in Christchurch she taught art throughout the 1920s before heading to London in 1932. She enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, honing her skills in life and portrait art, etching and engraving. During the war she taught at a number of schools and the Royal Holloway College and worked for the BBC. She nearly lost an eye while helping fight a blaze, caused by a German bomb, on the roof of a friend's house. She married fellow artist Marian Kratochwil in 1961. He helped her run her Chelsea art school and accompanied her on many trips abroad, where they painted and visited art galleries. Kathleen's early influences included Rembrandt, who, her husband said, she fell in love with. "Her early etchings were influenced by that master," he wrote in a book about her life. "Her fellow students used to call her 'Mrs Rembrandt'." Among her pupils was a young actress Joan Collins In 1979, Kathleen retired. She moved to Hampstead and concentrated on her own work. She died in 2007 at the age of 101. Author and biographer Tim Jeal, a pupil of Kathleen's, writes: "She was a gifted teacher and wonderful artist. In the mid-1990s Kathleen began to lose her sight - a terrible misfortune for an artist - but she never expressed bitterness or self-pity, remaining serene and generous-hearted to the end."