Hedwig Marquardt (28 November 1884 – 14 April 1969) is one of a relatively small number of women artists whose work belongs to the German expressionist tradition.
The earliest show the influence of contemporary German landscape painters, particularly those of the Worpswede School, and, in her figurative painting, that of Käthe Kollwitz.
The figure of the horse, a symbol of energy and the free spirit, a recurrent image in her work, may derive from her country upbringing but also owes much to Marc.
[2] As for so many women artists, Marquardt found it hard to make a living from her art, particularly in the troubled period after the First World War.
In 1924 she was invited by Philip Danner, who had himself left Karlsruhe factory to lead a new company producing ceramic art in Kiel, to join the Kieler Kunst-Keramik.
The two tried for a time to survive as independent artists, producing small ceramics, embroidery and illustrative and commercial art, but in 1927 Marquardt accepted a teaching post at a school in Hanover, a position she held until her retirement in 1949.
After the early death of Kaiser in 1932, Marquardt shared her life with the artist Charlotte (Lotte) Boltze (1881—1959), a close friend ever since they had studied together in Munich.
However, there are also gentler, more naturalistic depictions, particularly of trees, that look back to German Romanticism of the nineteenth century, also powerful woodcut-like pen and ink portraits that owe much to Dürer.