von Kaulitz, Marion Bertha Gräfin

Marion Bertha Countess von Kaulitz was born in 1865 in Braunschweig, Germany, to a British mother and a German father. Little is known about her personal life – French publications in 1910 refer to her as “Mademoiselle Kaulitz,” perhaps indicating an unmarried woman. She worked as a painter and illustrator of children’s books and moved in Munich artist circles. Her artist dolls became a personal passion later in life. They were produced in her workshop Münchner Künstler Kaulitz-Puppen in the small town of Gmünd, on Lake Tegern south of Munich. The dolls’ initial acclaim prompted her to trademark the Münchner Künstler Kaulitz-Puppen and to invest heavily in their production, expanding into doll-related products such as tea cozies and puppets. Her distributors were large German department stores, such as Tietz, Wertheim and the Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin. The famed Austrian Vienna Workshops, which expanded in 1910 to an office in Berlin, also included von Kaulitz dolls into their sales repertory. However, the dolls were quickly surpassed by those made by Käthe Kruse, and von Kaulitz died impoverished in 1948.