The Life-Sphinx
A winged woman lies slumped forward over a rock, wings still spread, the body of a beast behind her; water lilies open at the base of the rock, gulls cut low across the spray, and beyond are cypresses and a stretch of moonlit water. The painting is untraced. What survives is this plate, printed in the Berlin magazine Berliner Leben in 1899 beside a photograph of the painter in her studio.
The magazine’s notice put the picture in the company she would have wanted:
Her large symbolic painting Mors imperator caused much stir in its day, and the picture Lebenssphynx, which we reproduce beside the portrait of the artist, is of considerable effect in its Böcklinesque mood.
Arnold Böcklin was then the most admired symbolist painter in the German-speaking world, and the comparison is the highest praise the notice had to give.
The title stayed with her. She used it again for a collection of novellas published at Leipzig by G. Müller-Mann and reviewed in November 1901 — so Lebenssphinx names both a painting and a book, and the two should not be confused.
The picture was long dated to about 1899–1900 on the strength of where it appears in her memoir. That is wrong: Der Kunstwart called it “the last great picture” at her one-woman exhibition on the Pincio in Rome in January 1894, which places it in 1893 — and the memoir is arranged by place and theme rather than by date.
Even the spelling moved about in print. The plate here is captioned Lebenssphinx; the notice on the facing page spells it Lebenssphynx; the 1901 review of the book prints Lebensphinx, with a single s.