Doris Zinkeisen: Artist on the Frontline

One of the few female war artists of the Second World War, Doris Clare Zinkeisen travelled overseas to paint the horrors of war and was the first artist on the scene at the liberated Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Doris offered her services as a war artist at a time when the artistic portrayal of war was very much a man’s territory. She was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to record and reflect the humanitarian work of the Joint War Organisation of the British Red Cross and Order of St John as it moved into newly liberated Europe in the 1940s.

Doris was born in Scotland in 1898 and moved with her family to Middlesex in 1909. Having shown great artistic talent from a young age, Doris and her sister, Anna Zinkeisen, were awarded scholarships to the Royal Academy Schools in Piccadilly, now the Royal Academy of Arts. This was Britain’s first institution which provided professional art training. She and Anna exhibited their work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1921 along with a circle of female artists. This was however met with much controversy as traditional art circles were furious with the decision to give these women a prominent position in the exhibition. Nevertheless, Doris soon became a highly acclaimed society portraitist and a well-known costume and set designer. One of her well-known works include costume designs for Noel Coward’s play This Year of Grace at the London Pavillion in 1928. She also designed murals for the RMS Queen Mary in 1935 and RMS Queen Elizabeth in 1940 as well as producing commercial Railway posters.

During the First World War, Doris volunteered as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse in a hospital in Northwood, Middlesex caring for convalescing soldiers injured on the front. Her record card held by the British Red Cross shows that she volunteered from June 1918 to January 1919.  During the Second World War, Doris once again volunteered as a VAD nurse in St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington where she nursed air raid victims. Combining her humanitarian work with her artistic skills, she produced paintings of wounded air raid victims she nursed.

Although often forgotten and despite the limited opportunities provided at the time, female artists produced fascinating works of art showing their portrayal of war. The first official war artists’ scheme was set up in 1916 by the British government. 47 men were commissioned with only four women of which three had their work rejected. The War Artists Advisory Committee was set up by the British Government in 1939. When the committee was dissolved in December 1945, its collection consisted of 5,570 works of art produced by over four hundred artists. These artists consisted of those employed on either full-time or short-term contracts or those who were commissioned for individual works to be acquired by the Committee. Of the approximate 400 artists, only 52 were women with only one woman on a full-time contract. Doris was commissioned at the end of the war and her paintings were amongst the works acquired by the Committee. She was amongst the few women who broke the stereotypes and braved the horrors of war to tell the story of war beyond the home front. She travelled around north-west Europe by lorry or by air from a nearby RAF base, sketching images in different places and then transforming them into oil paintings in her studio based in Brussels at the Joint War Commission’s headquarters, which had been the German headquarters during the occupation.

Four of the paintings by Doris Zinkeisen are held by the British Red Cross Museum collection, others are held by the Imperial War Museum & the Museum of the Order of St John.

Doris was the first artist to enter the infamous Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp after it was liberated on 15 April 1945, she would have witnessed the 13,000 unburied bodies and around 60,000 inmates, most acutely sick and starving. Her paintings not only captured the relief work carried out by the British Red Cross, but the disturbing scenes of captivity and the pain and suffering around her. In letters that she wrote to her husband, she described the horrors that had taken place “The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten. First of all was the ghastly smell of typhus. The simply ghastly sight of skeleton bodies just flung out of the huts.” She stayed at the camp until it was burnt down on the 21 May 1945.  

No doubt the horrors of war haunted Doris for some time after she finished her work in 1945. Nevertheless, she returned to work as a theatrical designer and held exhibitions of her work. Following the death of her husband in 1946, she moved to Suffolk with her two daughters and died at the age of 92 in 1991.

Although small in number, Doris Zinkeisen and other women artists ensured that war was not just seen through the eyes of men, they showed that women could also play a crucial role in portraying and interpreting war. The role of women during the First and Second World Wars is often remembered as consisting of nursing and caring for injured soldiers and civilians, however art produced by women illustrates that women’s contribution to humanitarian work during the wars went beyond this. They had not only the creative talents but the strength to unflinchingly record and present the traumatic and horrific scenes of war.

Mehzebin Adam

Curator at the British Red Cross