Lake View, c. 1930s
Painter, composer and writer Josefine Auspitz was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Austria) on 21 December 1873 - she was distantly related to the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky - and privately tutored at home, showing early artistic promise. In 1894 she married Alfred Fröhlich of Feldau, with whom she had two children; following their divorce she was remarried to the Viennese doctor and poet Josef Winter (1857–1916). During the First World War she took over the management of a children's home and her husband founded a sanatorium and mobile epidemic laboratories for the Red Cross. After the war she exhibited in both 1923 and 1924 at the Vienna Künstlerhaus and in 1927 published a book entitled 'Fifty years of a Viennese house' (Wilhelm Braumüller, Vienna / Leipzig). In 1936 a recital of works that she had composed took place in Vienna. Following the 'Anschluss' (Nazi annexation of Austria) in 1938 and the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, her property was confiscated and her assets seized. She was deported on 15 July 1942 to the Theresienstadt ghetto, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where she died on 20 January 1943
