Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge

---

(22 August 1869 – 7 February 1948)

Adela Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge, known professionally as Dora Ohlfsen, was an Australian sculptor and art medallist. 

Ohlfsen was born in Ballarat, Victoria, to Kate Ohlfsen-Bagge, née Harrison, an Australian whose family were from England, and Christian Hermann Ohlfsen-Bagge, an engineer born in Grabionna (now Poland) of Norwegian stock.

The family was well known locally. Kate Ohlfsen-Bagge was the daughter of Captain John Harrison—born in Cumberland, England, and known in Australia for land squatting and political activism—and granddaughter of the first government printer in Victoria, George Howe. Christian Ohlfsen-Bagge moved to Australia in 1849 and made money during the Victorian gold rush. In 1855 he was the architect of the Olympic Theatre in Melbourne (demolished in 1894), which had been constructed in England and shipped to Australia, and he was involved in the construction of the Ballarat public library and the Bondi Ocean Outfall Sewer.

Working mostly in Italy, her first prominent work was a bronze medallion, The Awakening of Australian Art (1907), which won an award at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London and was purchased for the Petit Palais in Paris. Other notable works include the Anzac Medal (1916), created to raise funds for Australians and New Zealanders who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and Sacrifice (1926), the war memorial in Formia, Italy.

Ohlfsen's portrait medallions were commissioned by or on behalf of a wide range of public figures, such as the actor Mary Anderson, the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and several senior politicians, including H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, Billy Hughes, and Mussolini, who allowed her to sketch him in 1922 at the Palazzo Chigi while he worked.

In 1948 Ohlfsen and her lifelong partner, Hélène de Kuegelgen, were found dead in their apartment in Rome as a result of a gas leak, deemed by the police to have been an accident. The women were buried together in the city's non-Catholic cemetery, and friends packed up the contents of Ohlfsen's studio, which have never been traced. Twenty-five of her works are known to have survived, out of at least 121.

Article and image from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Ohlfsen-Bagge