[1] Other notable works include the Anzac Medal (1916), created to raise funds for Australians and New Zealanders who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and Sacrifice (1926), the war memorial in Formia, Italy.

[2][3] Ohlfsen's portrait medallions were commissioned by or on behalf of a wide range of public figures, such as the actor Mary Anderson, the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and several senior politicians, including H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, Billy Hughes, and Mussolini, who allowed her to sketch him in 1922 at the Palazzo Chigi while he worked.

In 1948 Ohlfsen and her lifelong partner, Hélène de Kuegelgen, were found dead in their apartment in Rome as a result of a gas leak, deemed by the police to have been an accident.

Kate Ohlfsen-Bagge was the daughter of Captain John Harrison—born in Cumberland, England, and known in Australia for land squatting and political activism—and granddaughter of the first government printer in Victoria, George Howe.

[9] In or around July 1892 Ohlfsen decided to study music in Berlin, a plan that was financed by a female friend, apparently with help from Francis Bathurst Suttor, the Australian Minister for Education, and Alfred Pelldram, Consul-General of Germany for Australia.

[20][21] The historian Ros Pesman writes that "either [Ohlfsen], the journalist, or both constructed a romantic narrative of the life of the 'lady artist', a little outré and eccentric, including early exotic adventuring and later participation in a cosmopolitan and sophisticated art world.

[26] Her career as a pianist over, she visited friends in Oranienbaum, Russia, on the Gulf of Finland,[27] and there, it seems, she met her lifelong companion, Hélène (or Elena) de Kuegelgen, a Russian countess.

[35] Ohlfsen also said she had been taught sculpture by Camille Alaphilippe at the French Academy in Rome; Paul Landowski, creator of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro; and the metal engraver Pierre Dautel.

[36] Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women (1868), apparently had an apartment on the same street in 1870–1871 and, according to Susan Cheever, sat for her first portrait in the studio of the American artist George Healy, also on S. Nicola da Tolentino.

[40] "[A]ll the well-known singers, artists, men of letters, society leaders are to be seen," a reporter wrote of Ohlfsen's weekly salons in her studio, "and almost every language to be heard.

[42][16] In 1903 three of Ohlfsen's paintings were exhibited in Rome at the annual Mostra Della Società Amatori e Cultori di Belle Ari; she told a reporter she had been introduced to Queen Elena of Italy.

[46] In June 1907 the art historian Arturo Jahn Rusconi wrote in Emporium of Ohlfsen's "delightful bas-reliefs in bronze, portraits and various compositions, executed with tremendous grace and subtlety of spirit.

This year, as well as some portrait medals and plaquettes finely worked up, she has exhibited a very beautiful plaque, Autumn [l'Autunno], which together with refined taste also demonstrates mastery of sculptural modelling.

[49] The pastoral scene on the back, with its "strangely living flock of sheep and the lonely shepherd", conveys "the whole soul and spirit of wide spaces of marvellous solitude and of newness and freedom", in the view of one reporter.

[50] A few months earlier, Ohlfsen's work had been praised in Rivista di Roma, in a three-page cover story by Rusconi: The spirit of a Pisanello, a Boldù or a Matteo de' Pasti is revived in the tenuous and robust medals of the very young sculptor.

[61][58] Among the works shown was a medallion portrait in lead of Hélène de Kuegelgen, showing "that fair-haired beauty as a woman of noble elegance of face and figure, who leans her chin upon her hand.

[65][72] Chanin and Miller write that, inspired by Classical Greek art, Ohlfsen exaggerated the physicality of the men and horses so that a sense of movement remained evident from a distance.

[76] There had been a disagreement about the cost of bronze; Ohlfsen said the gallery's director, Gother Mann, must "really imagine that I have sums of money lying about in war time to spend like that on my own account.

"[79] The cancellation came as a great shock to Ohlfsen, who feared it would damage her reputation; she wrote to F. Graham Lloyd, the gallery's London agent, in November 1919: "I cannot tell you how amazed I am, nor how incomprehensible it all seems to me nor how unexpected."

[91] Peers argued that the image of the soldier on the reverse, almost in silhouette, "avoided the usual over-literal depiction of men in uniform, which characterises the more pedantic medals that generally were produced in Australia during and after the war.

The almost total emphasis on the outline of the figure allows [Ohlfsen] ... to consider the question of negative, as well as positive, space within the roundel suggesting ... how keenly she attended to the issue of designing for the medal format.

"[86] Ohlfsen apparently sold hundreds of the medals to Sir Charles Wade, Premier of New South Wales, so that he could sell them in Australia at two guineas each to raise money.

[92] Edward, Prince of Wales received the first medal, and Wade, along with Generals William Birdwood, John Monash, and Talbot Hobbs, joined a committee in 1919 to oversee the distribution.

[75][i] Exhibits included Mrs. Grey (1917), a painting of Alexandra Simpson, model for the Anzac medal;[102] The Awakening of Australian Art; a pastel of the Austrian bombing of Venice; a small sculpture called the Blind Ardito (the Arditi were an Italian World War I elite unit); and medallion portraits of General Birdwood, David Lloyd George, H. H. Asquith, General Giuseppe Garibaldi II, Sir Charles Wade, William Holman, and Cardinal William Henry O'Connell.

[97]Her other work at this time included medallions of Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes (1921)[103] and one of Robert Randolph Garran—Solicitor-General of Australia and an old friend of her father who acted as Ohlfsen's mentor[104]— and a bust of Nellie Stewart (1922) that appeared in Women's World.

Ohlfsen was "strongly influenced by the cult of dynamic he-men forging history, in line with early Italian Fascism," Stella Free wrote in the Grove Dictionary of Art.

In or around 1923, as a result of Ohlfsen's friendship with Duke Fulco Tosti di Valminuta, who had become an undersecretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italian government commissioned her to create a war memorial in Formia on the coast of Lazio.

[111][25][114] She described the ceremony in a letter: Thousands were present; the entire province, Commandants of the fifth Army Corps and of the Navy; Minister of Public Instruction (Signor Fidele) for the Government.

[115]Chanin and Miller write that Ohlfsen's "choice of bronze and marble for her monument, the decorative band of fasci at the top of the support and her coupling of masculine sacrifice with feminine nurturing fits well with the fascist agenda for sculpture, in its promotion of the myth of Italianiata.

[j] Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1935, Huntly McCrae Cowper described "a big room high up in a corner with long windows looking down into narrow streets on either side.