Sabine Lepsius

Sabine Lepsius studied at Académie Julian. Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purrmann is recorded as having studied under Sabine Lepsius. The recorded working language is German. The field of work recorded is painting. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Work by Sabine Lepsius is recorded in the collections of Jewish Museum Berlin, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin and Alte Nationalgalerie.

She was born in Berlin as the daughter of portrait painter Gustav Graef and Franziska Liebreich (1824–1893), a lithographer. She studied with her father and, in 1892, married the painter Reinhold Lepsius. She and her husband were held in equal regard and were very popular with the business community and the wealthy. Her brother was the art historian Botho Graef. She was also a close friend and follower of Stefan George. Her son Stefan (1897–1917), who was killed in World War I, was named after him. In 1935 she published a book about their friendship in which she attributed her brother Botho's fatal heart attack to the news of her son's death. Lepsius exhibited her work at the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Her salon in Berlin-Westend was considered a major social gathering point. Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey, August Endell and Rainer Maria Rilke were among those who attended. She was one of the founding members of the Berlin Secession and exhibited with them until 1913. Most of her approximately 280 portraits were of people in the Jewish community and were lost or destroyed during World War II. Lepsius died in 1942 in Bayreuth.