Occasionally one stumbles onto an artist almost completely unknown outside their home country for no good reasons other than 1. The artist is a woman or 2. No one at the time understood their work. Both seem true of Lizzy Ansingh (Dutch, 1875-1959, full name Maria Elisabeth Georgina Ansingh).

Maria Elisabeth Georgina (‘Lizzy’) Ansingh, ”The Source of Life, “1916. An intricate and masterfully composed painting in which dolls gather around a fountain topped by the sculpture of a winged fairy bathing in the jets of water.

Overshadowed in life by a more famous and more conventional aunt, if anyone notices Lizzy Ansingh now it’s because her modest body of work consists largely of depictions of her dolls. Although this is unique in the history of Western art, to fixate on the fact is to miss the point.

She wasn’t an eccentric figure or still life painter who became obsessed with dolls. She was a visionary painter who used what came to hand to stake out her own territory of the imagination. She was tapping into insights hinted at in the strange world of dreams and surrealistic fantasies explored by contemporaries such as Italian surrealist Georgio de Chirico and French Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. 

Maria Elisabeth Georgina (‘Lizzy’) Ansingh. The mask in the still life above recalls Odilon Redon’s use of masks in his proto-surrealist works, perhaps most famously in his lithographs dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe (below).

Odilon Redon, “To Edgar Allen Poe: A Mask Sounds the Death Knell,” 1882.

Odilon Redon, Woman in a Helmet, 1891

These are all mysterious paintings hinting at the shadowy avenues of the human psyche that life in the daily hustle and bustle demands we ignore.

Another on of Ansingh’s still lifes adopt the later Redon’s abstracted flowers and diffuse color fields while anticipating a similar classical bust in the juxtaposition of objects in Giorgio De Chirico’s pre-surrealist metaphysical art.


(LEFT) Giorgio De Chirico, “The Song of Love (Metaphysical Composition), 1914, (RIGHT) Lizzy Ansingh, Untitled Still life, c. 1910

Then again, a painting like “The Restless” (below) joins a conversation about human life that Pablo Picasso began 10 years earlier with his early Blue and Rose Periods; isolated figures inhabit a world drained of naturalistic color so as to emphasize the mythopoetic (allegorical, symbolic, timeless) nature of the expression. There as here, we are confronted with mysteries at the heart of experience for which no easy answers are found.

Lizzy Ansingh, “Rustelozen” (The Restless), 1926

Far from merely copying these mighty innovators, Lizzy Ansingh had the insight to use dolls as stand-ins for humanity in her own dreamlike otherworlds that equally reflect back on our own from beyond. I’ve not encountered anything quite like her work elsewhere in the canon. She ought to be better known.

Lizzy Ansingh. “The Performance.”

A painting like “The Performance” (above) or “Witches’ Sabbat” (below) opens a Pandora’s box of bizarre characters and curious vignettes. In the latter, a skeleton king stands by as an birdlike demon assaults a stout old woman, a monkey magistrate scowls as a beautiful young woman in a gown made of butterfly wings emerges, encircled by a serpentine dragon, from a steaming cauldron.

Lizzy Ansingh, “Witches’ Sabbat,” oil on canvas, 1916

In another surreal tapestry, a flowing red fish encounters a broken porcelain doll amid the corals and anemones in a fantasy of the ocean floor.

Lizzy Sangh, Untitled (still life with doll, fish, and corals). C. 1910

Lizzy Ansingh, Untitled Still life, c. 1920

Pat Firoello, “Red and Green,” oil, 16×20

If you’re interested in cementing a solid foundation for your own excursions into still life painting, check out Pat Firoello’s video, “Elegant Still Life- Fresh and Fearless Painting”