Johanne Hänschell

Johanne Margrethe Hänschell was born on 7 February 1880 on St. Croix in the Danish West Indies, the daughter of Albert Hänschell — a legally trained colonial official who served as overretsprokurator and auditor in Christiansted, and later as mayor and city and district bailiff in Næstved — and of Christiane Margrethe, née Henckel, whose middle name her daughter carried. The Copenhagen police registers — the Politiets Registerblade, on which every adult resident of the capital received a card — record her twice: born “Vestindien, Sankt Croix,” 7 February 1880, resident in central Copenhagen at Tordenskjoldsgade 14, fourth floor, and later at Nørregade 30. She had crossed from the colony to the capital by her late teens.

In 1904, aged twenty-four, she entered the Royal Porcelain Factory as a painter of Kurant Kunst — the “current art ware” that carried Arnold Krog’s underglaze naturalism into serial production — and she remained on the rolls into the 1930s. The factory’s roster tradition preserves her as “Hanschell, J., Kurant Kunst painter of underglaze art ware (1904–31+),” and assigns her the painter’s number 111, the mark painted in blue on the wares that passed through her hands. Hers was the world Emma Meyer had painted a few years earlier: the long sunlit room of women at their tables, plants and finished porcelain around them, rendering flora and fauna in cobalt beneath the glaze.

The Bestiaire’s cachepot is the work that gives the roster line a hand and a voice. It carries a marine scene with crabs and jellyfish in the factory’s soft marine palette. The base bears a full signature and date in underglaze script: “Johanne Hänschell. 1907.” The factory’s practice explains such a piece. According to Royal Copenhagen scholar Elliot Todd Ryser, the art-ware painters were permitted a few unique pieces for their own use or as gifts. The waves on this base are uncancelled, and no second example of the composition has been traced: the cachepot is thus most plausibly a personal piece, painted outside the catalog for herself or for someone she chose.

She remained at the factory through the years in which her birthplace changed flags — Denmark sold the West Indian islands to the United States in 1917, mid-way through her tenure — and she died in Copenhagen on 22 November 1954, aged seventy-four. The Danish death index records her under her own name, with no married style, and with a profession: “Hänschell, Joh. Margr., Malerinde” — woman painter — the state’s last word agreeing with the signature on this base. She spelled the name Hänschell in her own hand; the reference literature indexes her as Hanschell; both denote the same painter. The Bestiaire holds one work by her — the cachepot of 1907 — recovered from the collection’s own shelves in 2026, and with it, her name.