Doris Zinkeisen

Doris Clare Zinkeisen (31 July 1897 – 3 January 1991) was a Scottish theatrical stage and costume designer, painter, commercial artist, and writer. She was best known for her work in theatrical design.

Early life Doris Zinkeisen was born in Clynder House in Rosneath, Argyll, Scotland. Her parents were Welsh-born Clare Bolton-Charles and Victor Zinkeisen, a shipper, manufacturer and yarn merchant and amateur artist from Glasgow. Her father was Scottish-born, but both of his parents had emigrated from Altenburg in Thuringia in around 1859 and had settled in Scotland. She had a younger sister, Anna Zinkeisen, who also became an artist. Zinkeisen attended the Harrow School of Art for four years and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in 1917 together with her sister Anna.

She also worked widely in other media as an illustrator and commercial artist including producing advertising posters for several British mainline railway companies and murals for the . A 1939 poster for the London Underground, At the Theatre, was printed but never issued due to the start of World War II.

In 1944, Doris and her sister Anna were commissioned by United Steel Companies (USC) to produce twelve paintings that were reproduced in the trade and technical press in Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The images were subsequently collated in a book, This Present Age, published in 1946. Cambridge it's Quicker by Rail (1930) for LNER that shows Queen Elizabeth I visiting Queens College in 1564, Durham by LNER (1932) based on the legend of the dun cow shows pilgrims following a milkmaid with Durham Cathedral in the background, To York – Dick Turpin's Ride (1934) for LNER showing the eighteenth-century highwayman, Dick Turpin riding to York on his horse Black Bess with York Minster in the background, Western Highlands – Rob Roy (1934) for LNER/LMS showing Rob Roy standing on a mountain, Scarborough, In Grandmother's Day (1935) for LNER showing people in Scarborough on the spa bandstand in Victorian dress, with the castle and sea in the background, Coronation (1937) for LNER showing the Coronation, the locomotive built by Timothy Hackworth in 1831 in honour of the coronation of King William IV, What to see from the windows of the Atlantic Coast Express (1937), a guidebook produced for SR with illustrations, The Coronation (1937) with the text "designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, Chief Mechanical Engineer, LNER, in honour of the coronation of King George VI. Kings Cross – Edinburgh in 6 hours" showing the Coronation passing through the countryside, Captain Cook at Whitby (c. 1937) for LNER showing Captain Cook and two Royal Navy officers in Whitby harbour with St Mary's Church and Whitby Abbey in the background. The poster's text says "His voyages round the world for making new discoveries were undertaken in the Endeavour in 1768 and the Resolution in 1772. Both these ships were built at Whitby. It's quicker by rail. London and North Eastern Railway." Scotland by East Coast Route – LNER with the text "The articles of union between england & scotland were secretly signed in a cellar in high Street edinburgh 1706".

RMS Queen Mary In 1935, John Brown and Company Shipbuilders of Clydebank commissioned both of the Zinkeisen sisters to paint the murals in the Verandah Grill, a restaurant and night-club on the ocean liner the RMS Queen Mary. The murals, on the theme of entertainment, depicted circus and theatre scenes and can still be seen on the ship, now permanently moored in Long Beach, California. Writing in Vogue in 1936, Cecil Beaton described the Verandah Grill as 'By far the prettiest room on any ship – becomingly lit, gay in colour and obviously so successful that it would be crowded if twice its present size'. After the war, Zinkeisen restored the mural and reportedly painted a mouse in the mural so there would always be a mouse on the Queen Mary, a dig at Cunard, which prided itself on having no rodents on their ships. The play ran for 42 performances in May and June 1923 at the Regent Theatre in London. Claude Rains played three roles and the production was the professional debut for John Gielgud. Rains described Zinkeisen as "a stunning women". In 1933, Zinkeison designed the decor and costumes for Cochran's production of Cole Porter's musical Nymph Errant at the Adelphi Theatre in London. The décolletage formed by the low cut design of one of the costumes resulted in a strike by the chorus against the perceived indecency of the costume. Theatre manager C. B. Cochran was compelled to have the waistcoat altered to fill up the gap with gauze. In 1934, she designed the costumes for the Broadway musical The Great Waltz at the Center Theatre, together with Marion Claire, Marie Burke and Guy Robertson. In 1935, she designed the costumes and sets for Stop Press, the retitled London based version of the As Thousands Cheer revue by Moss Hart and Irving Berlin at the Adelphi Theatre. After the Blitz, during the Second World War, she designed costumes and sets for the Old Vic Company productions of Arms and the Man and Richard III with Margaret Leighton, Ralph Richardson, Sybil Thorndike, Joyce Redman and Laurence Olivier at the New Theatre. Nell Gwyn (1934), together with its sequel, Sixty Glorious Years. British-born director James Whale specifically requested Zinkeisen to design the costumes for the only American film she ever worked on, the 1936 screen version of the musical Show Boat. According to Harper, Zinkeisen described how she "valued visual flair and 'fantastic treatment' above all", that she thought theatrical and film performances should be led by the mise en scène and that audiences were unconsciously able to "decode complex visual details". She worked in the casualty department in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. Zinkeisen was one of a small number of artists who produced pictures of Bergen-Belsen in the months following its liberation. Her painting Human Laundry shows German orderlies washing camp inmates before they go to hospital. Thomas Sutcliffe, columnist for The Independent described the painting as "flatly representational", "as uninflected as a travel poster", showing "brutalisers obliged to become carers, victims turned to patients".

Paintings from Zinkeisen's time as a war artist are held by the Red Cross museum and archives, the museum of the Order of St John and the Imperial War Museum. After the war, Zinkeisen continued to work in London as a theatrical designer and held occasional exhibitions of her paintings. In 1954, Zinkeisen designed the scenery and costumes for Noël Coward's musical, After the Ball, based on Oscar Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's Fan, and the Prince Littler directed play, The Little Glass Clock, written by Hugh Mills.

Portraits by Harold Cazneaux

Harold Cazneaux produced three photographic portraits of Zinkeisen in 1929 in his role as chief photographer for The Home magazine; Doris Zinkeisen: New Idea portrait with patterned background, Doris Zinkeisen: New Idea portrait with leaf background, and Doris Zinkeisen with her brushes.

Doris Zinkeisen: New Idea portrait with leaf background was the first photographic cover for The Home that was launched in Sydney in 1920 and modelled on the American magazines Vanity Fair and House & Garden. Zinkeisen was said to have epitomised the "New Feminine Beauty" described by The Home in 1929 as "stark simplicity of line, of corners, angles, slimness, sharpness ... twenty years ago we were born curvy and now we are born straight." The leaf background was painted by the Australian artist Adrian Feint. The couple was reportedly engaged in 1924 but by 1925 the engagement was off. Zinkeisen married naval officer Edward Grahame Johnstone in 1927

Grahame Johnstone died in 1946 and Zinkeisen's twin girls then lived with her, with them all moving to Suffolk in 1966. Zinkeisen outlived her daughter Janet who died in an accident in 1979. Doris Zinkeisen died on 3 January 1991, in Badingham in Suffolk, aged 93.

Books