Dora Hitz | Impressionist/Symbolist painter
Dora Schitz (30 March 1856, Altdorf near Nuremberg – 20 November 1924, Berlin) was a court painter for the Romanian royal family, a member of the November Group and a co-founder of the Berlin Secession.
Dora Schitz painted mainly portraits of people, especially women, girls and mothers, sometimes in a symbolist style.
Since her stay in France, she has painted oil paintings, gouaches and watercolors in the Impressionist style.
At the age of six, her family moved to Ansbach, and at the age of thirteen she was sent to study at the "Madame Weber Art School" in Munich, an art school for young women, where she studied with Wilhelm von Lindenschmidt Jr.
At the 1876 Art and Industrial Exhibition, she met and befriended Princess Elisabeth of Wied of Romania (perhaps better known by her literary name "Carmen Silva").
As a result, Hitz was appointed court painter.
In addition to oil paintings and book illustrations, she created frescoes in the concert hall of the Château de Pere in Sinaia.
After 1880 she lived in Paris, where she studied with Luc Olivier Mersen, Gustave Courtois, Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constante and Eugène Carrière, who had the greatest influence on her style.
She spent 1886/87 in Romania before returning to Paris to become friends with Eugen Jethell and Hermann Barr.
She traveled throughout Brittany and Normandy, and in 1890 became a member of the Salon of the Society of French Artists.
From 1892 onwards she regularly participated in exhibitions of the National Society of the Fine Arts.
Although she has been and will continue to be successful in Paris, she moved to Berlin in 1892 and joined the "Vereins Berliner Künstlerinnen und Kunstfreundinnen" (an association of women artists), which gave her access to many upper-middle class clients who commissioned portraits.
She founded a girls' art school in 1894, ran a studio, and formed a friendship with Kate Corwitz.
Hitz exhibited her work in the Women's Building at the World's Columbus Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, in 1893.
In 1898, she was one of the founding members of the Berlin Secession.
In 1906, she was awarded the Villa Romana Prize, which included a stipend that enabled her to spend a year in Florence.
During the First World War, she began to experience financial difficulties, fell ill, and gradually became a recluse.