The show will illuminate the full breadth of her work, from that inspired by the surrealist movement in the 1930s through to her abstract work of the 1960s. Her anti-war cartoons will be on show alongside her intricate book jacket designs. The exhibition will also feature a series of Moomin drawings only recently discovered this year at the British Cartoon Archive.

The Moomins will be familiar to many of us who grew up in post-war Europe. With nine books, five picture books and a comic strip setting the precedent for numerous television series and films in the later century, the hippopotamus-esque characters have been a consistent feature of popular culture in Europe for decades.

Those eager to understand better the genesis and development of Moominvalley will be well catered for at the exhibition, which will display Jansson's talents as a writer alongside her artistic merit. Her original illustrations and comic strips for Ny Tid and The Evening News will illuminate the evolution of the series and will provide an insight into her principal influences and thought-processes, such as the Second World War and her family life.

The underlying motif of the display will emphasise the kaleidoscopic stages of Janssen's life. Highlights will include The Smoking Girl (1940) in which the artist paints herself as a defiant young woman in the face of the turbulent political climate in Europe. We see her transition into a confidant young woman in her Lynx Boa, painted only two years later.

The exhibition is sure to draw attention to the incredible wider body of work by Tove Jansson, and broaden our understanding of and appreciation for her art outside The Moomins, for which she is most widely known and most celebrated.