Tusnelda Sanders

Tusnelda Sanders (born Frida Nielsen, 1894–1978) was a noted Danish primitivist painter and illustrator whose works were sold both in France and in North American galleries from 1944 until her death.

From the 1920s until her death, she lived and made art in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the artists' colony on the Cote d’Azur near Nice, France.

Amusing fantasy and sly humor blend in the work.”[9] Returning to Cagnes-sur-Mer after World War II, she would ship the paintings to galleries abroad.

[14] In the 1960s, George Caspari Inc. offered a boxed selection of twenty greeting cards depicting reproductions of four paintings by Tusnelda.

[18] In the 1920s, Frida Nielsen Moeller followed her Danish friends, painter Vilhelm Lundstrøm and wife Yrsa Hansen, to the artist colony Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice.

As Frida Nielsen, she purchased the house at 6 Place Grimaldi, Haut-Cagnes, which is depicted in a photograph captioned in Danish,"Tusnelda Sanders hus, Haut-de-Cagnes, 1925," in the 1993 monograph about Vilhelm Lundstrøm.

[22] A photograph of the exterior of her second studio in Haut-Cagnes is labelled in Danish as "Tusnelda Sanders hus Haut-de-Cagnes, 1993" in the 1993 Lundstrøm monograph.

[23] Under her maiden name Frida Nielsen, “artiste peintre,” she and Ross Stevens Sanders married in Cagnes-sur- mer on March 20, 1941 as they prepared to flee France.

[29] Tusnelda worked in Harold Ambellan's Designed Tiles silkscreen studio in Manhattan and commenced exhibiting her naive paintings starting in 1944.

[34] The detailed companion exhibition catalog of this retrospective, also published in 2011 by Ville de Cagnes-sur-Mer, presented an essay on her art and her life.