Frankfurther was born in the
Dahlem district of Berlin to a Jewish family. Her father, Paul, was a businessman while her mother, Henriette, was an economics graduate. Henriette died of cancer 18 months after Eva was born and her father remarried in 1934. The family fled to Britain in 1939 to avoid persecution under the Nazis. The children, Eva and her two siblings, left Berlin six months before their parents and spent some time in
Haslemere, being looked after by German refugee teachers, before their parents arrived in England during August 1939. There she studied life drawing under
Roland Vivian Pitchforth and was held in great esteem by her fellow students, who included
Leon Kossoff and
Frank Auerbach. As a student, Frankfurther had spent some summers in America. After graduating in 1951, she visited Italy, where she painted numerous portraits of street beggars and pilgrims, and then, briefly, Paris. Frankfurther also painted portraits of the local East End population. The same gallery hosted a memorial exhibition in 1962 and included examples of her work in their 2014
Refiguring the 50s exhibition and held a one-person show of her work in 2017. ==Exhibitions==