Augusta Preitinger
1878–1946 · German-born Dutch painter based in Paris
Juliana Augusta Preitinger, known as Guus, was a painter born in Cologne in 1878 who became a Dutch citizen and spent most of her adult life in Paris. She is chiefly remembered for her career as a modern painter in the French capital in the early twentieth century, and for her marriage to the painter Kees van Dongen, with whom she shared both an artistic and a family life.
Her family moved to Rotterdam, where Guus was encouraged to pursue art training and studied at the art academy, meeting Van Dongen there as a fellow student. The two decided to move to Paris together, and they married there in July 1901. They had a son who died two days after his birth, and a daughter, Augusta, known as Dolly, born in 1905. That same year the family settled in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where they were neighbours of Pablo Picasso and Fernande Olivier.
In 1914 she took her daughter to Rotterdam for a family visit, and the outbreak of the First World War kept her from returning to Paris until 1918. By then Van Dongen had begun a relationship with Léa Alvin, also known as Jasmy Jacob. The couple divorced in 1921, the year Guus exhibited at the Galerie Artes. She continued painting and died in Paris in January 1946.