Elisabeth von Eicken

Elisabeth von Eicken (1862 - 1940) was a German landscape painter associated with Impressionism and the Barbizon School. She worked in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, when many artists turned to nature as a subject in place of academic painting.

Born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, she studied in Merano, Menton, Geneva and Berlin before completing her training in Paris with the French engraver and landscape painter Edmond Yon. There she was strongly influenced by the Barbizon School and by the British painter Alfred Sisley, an influence visible in her handling of light and atmosphere in landscape.

From 1894 she worked as an independent artist in the artists' colony at Ahrenshoop and in Berlin-Grunewald, where she built a house and was close to the colony's founders. She was regularly shown at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition from 1894 and at international exhibitions in Munich, Paris and St Louis. Her works include Waldeinsamkeit (Forest Loneliness), Regenstimmung (Rain Mood) and Stille am Bach (Silence on the Creek). In 1895 she married Henry Edler von Paepke, lord of the manor of Quassel near Lübtheen.

Her legacy is remembered above all for her forest and autumn landscapes, and for her place within the Ahrenshoop artists' colony.