MILEIN Cosman, who honed her skills in Oxford before drawing the great artistic names of the 20th century, has died aged 96.

Working on commission for publishers, magazines and newspapers, she sketched Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin, TS Eliot, Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

She was led by a love of music and by her long collaboration with her Viennese husband, the musician and broadcaster Hans Keller.

Their book Stravinsky at Rehearsal (1962), which combined his words with her drawings, is a classic.

Ms Cosman worked in ink and pencil and was never inhibited by the fame of her subjects.

She drew author Thomas Mann while he was lecturing, Sir Arthur Bliss conducting, and John Ogdon at the piano.

Emilie Cosmann (her brother nicknamed her 'Milein' and she dropped the last letter of her surname when she came to Britain) was born on March 31, 1921 into a German-Jewish family in Gotha in Germany.

She was educated largely in Düsseldorf, and in 1939 followed her brother to Scotland.

After gaining entry to the Slade School of Fine Art – by turning up in person with her portfolio – she lived in a leaky garret behind the Ashmolean Museum, where the Slade was evacuated to for the duration of the Second World War.

She studied drawing under Randolph Schwabe and in 1943 she attended evening classes with Bernard Meninsky at Oxford Polytechnic.

She supported herself by delivering milk with a pony and trap and teaching French at a convent school.

It was also at Oxford that she met novelist Iris Murdoch, then a student, and was invited back for cocoa at Somerville College.

Ms Cosman moved to London at the end of the war, where she worked as an illustrator and began to submit sketches to magazines and newspapers.

In 1947, while working on a commission, she met Hans Keller, who became her most frequent subject. His face adorned the walls of the Hampstead house they bought in the 1960s, and where Ms Cosman stayed after his death in 1985.

In 1958 Miss Cosman worked on a schools’ TV series about drawing for ITV, and in the 1960s she joined Camden Printmakers.

In 2006 she established the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust to support education in these fields.

Milein Cosman died on November 21 and is survived by three nieces and a nephew.