Design and Art Australia Online

sculptor, painter and pianist, was born in Ballarat, Victoria, of an Australian mother, Kate Harison, and a Norwegian father, Christian Herm Ohlfsen-Bagge. She claimed that her great-grandfather was the Sydney convict printer, Robert Howe. Dora was educated at Sydney Girls High School and studied piano privately with Max Volgrich and Henri Kowalski. The story of her fascinating expatriate career is somewhat complicated by the different versions of it she gave the Australian press on visits to this county; but essentially it appears that, having shown great promise as a pianist, she travelled alone to Germany in about 1883 in order to continue piano studies under Moritz Moszkowski in Berlin, then was forced to abandon this with the onset of neuritis. She moved to Russia where, she stated, she lived in St Petersburg with a Madame Kerbitz and took up painting, the Czarina buying one of her works. She apparently worked as a music teacher and as 'a sort of secretary’ to the American Ambassador, wrote articles on Russian music, theatre and drama and travelled to various Baltic states. Later she left for Rome, where she took up sculpture, reputedly working in the studio of Alaphillipe at the French Academy and studying under the French metal engraver, Pierre Dautel.

Ohlfsen set up a studio/apartment on via San Nicola, close to the Spanish Steps, and Rome remained her home until her death. Although continuing to paint in watercolour and pastel, during the first two decades of the new century she executed many medallions, her subjects being both imaginative symbolist compositions and academic portraits. The latter were drawn from the wealthy and famous in Rome, England and Australia, and included Lord Chelmsford, Sir James Fairfax and General Peppino Garibaldi.

Visiting Sydney in 1912, Ohlfsen exhibited with the Royal Art Society then held an exhibition of her medallions at Melbourne in 1913. During World War I she remained in Italy and joined the Red Cross as a nurse. In 1916 she produced the Anzac medallion, one of her finest works, which was sold in London in an (unknown) edition to aid the Australian soldiers’ war effort. She again visited Australia in about 1920-21. Patronised by the Fascist regime, she produced a large medallion relief portrait of Mussolini and – her most important commission – a war memorial for Formia in 1924-26.

Ohlfsen’s works of the 1930s included portraits and imaginative sculptures demonstrating the conservative ideology of race and national progress which characterised Fascistic imaging. William Moore in the Brisbane Courier of 8 March 1930 referred to her as the artist who modelled a bust of Nellie Stewart; she also sculpted the head of W.A. Holman in plaster. Little is then known of her until 1948 when she and her companion, the Russian Baroness Heléne de Kuegelgen, were found dead in Ohlfsen’s gas-filled studio in Rome.

Writers:

Edwards, Deborah

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992