Australian Sculptor Dora Ohlfsen (1869-1948)

The Awakening of Australian Art (1907) by Dora Ohlfsen.

Australian Sculptor Dora Ohlfsen

Adela Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge (1869-1948) known professionally as Dora Ohlfsen. She was an Australian sculptor and art medallist.Born in Ballarat in 1869, she left Australia in 1886 and lived most of her life in Rome.

In or around July 1892, Dorah Ohlfsen decided to study music in Berlin which she did for a few years. Unfortunately, she developed a health issue with her arm so she could not persue a career as a concert pianist. On a visit to Russia in 1896, it seems, she met her lifelong partner, Hélène (or Elena) de Kuegelgen, a Russian countess. There she started to study art and in 1902, she and Elena moved to Rome, Italy. She furthered her art studies in Rome.

Her first prominent artwork was a bronze medallion, The Awakening of Australian Art, which won an award at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London.

‘The first of Ohlfsen’s art to be added to a public collection was The Awakening of Australian Art (1907), a bronze medallion 29.5 cm in diameter, which the French government purchased in 1907 for the Petit Palais [in Paris]. “Australia is personified as the New Dawn or Venus arising from the sea,” Chanin and Miller write. The pastoral scene on the back, with its “strangely living flock of sheep and the lonely shepherd”, conveys “the whole soul and spirit of wide spaces of marvellous solitude and of newness and freedom”, in the view of one reporter. “Miss Ohlfsen has caught the spirit of Australia.” In June 1908 the medal won an award at the Franco-British Exhibition in London. – Wikipedia

‘On 7 February 1948, Ohlfsen and her companion Elena von Kügelgen were found dead in their Rome apartment. Their deaths were found to be accidental through gas poisoning, but some have suggested joint suicide.
The couple were buried together the non-Catholic cemetery of Rome. The epitaph on Ohlfsen’s tombstone – where her sculpture of Dionysius was placed – reads: ‘Dora Ohlfsen Bagge. Australian by birth, Italian at heart.’
Today only a handful of Ohlfsen’s works remain. Though some can be found in public collections around the world, most have disappeared …’ – Art Gallery of New South Wales

Twenty-five of Ohlfsen’s works are known to have survived, out of at least 121.

Study for Head of Australia by Dora Ohlsfen, 1917. Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive.

The Madonna by Dora Ohlssen, 1930s, copy print of a gelatine silver photograph. Photographed by Dora Ohlfsen. Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive.

Plaster study for marble bust of Mrs Piercy by Dora Ohlfsen, c1916. Photograph by Dora Ohlfsen. Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive. The location of this work is unknown.

Dionysius by Dorah Ohlfsen, 1930s. Copy print of a gelatin silver photograph. Photograph by Dora Ohlfsen. Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive.