painter, theatrical designer and commercial artist, was born at Roseneath, Gareloch, Scotland, the elder daughter of Victor Zinkeisen, a research chemist of German descent. In 1909 the family moved to Pinner, near Harrow, in Middlesex. Doris and her younger sister, Anna Katrina Zinkeisen (1901-1976), studied at Harrow School of Art for four years, then both won scholarships to the Royal Academy Schools in 1917 and shared a London studio. In the mid 1920s Doris drew advertisements for Johnny Walker whisky for the Paul E. Derrick Advertising Agency. Examples published in Posters and Publicity’s Commercial Art Annual (1927) show bright young things in short skirts and fox stoles doing the Charleston, and gentlemen in tweed coats and fedoras farewelling a dashing pilot in an Art Deco aviation parody of a nineteenth-century English cartoon. In 1927 Doris married Grahame Johnstone, a naval officer. By 1929 she had exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon and been elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. She won medals at the Paris Salon in 1929 and again in 1930.

Doris was best known as a theatrical designer, the costumes and scenery for the Insect Play being among her earliest works. Other designs included the costumes for Noel Coward’s On with the Dance of 1925 (jointly with the young Oliver Messel) and all scenery and costumes for Coward’s Nymph Errant (1933) starring Gertrude Lawrence. She was chief costume and scenery designer for Charles B. Cochran’s popular London revues. Cochran paid her special tribute in an article published in the Studio (1927):

Miss Doris Zinkeisen seems to me to follow the best traditions of English theatrical decoration… She can now create costumes for all moods and times, and capture with equal facility the acid fervour of puritanism or the sweet lyricism of a faun… this young decorator, at her early age is, in my opinion, in the front rank of British designers.

Zinkeisen paid a short visit to Australia with her husband and their twin babies in 1929, coinciding with the Australian production of Cochran’s revue, This Year of Grace . Her oil painting, The Yellow Smock , was acquired by Howard Hinton (New England Regional Art Museum). Back at London she continued to work for Cochran, designing (with Rex Whistler) the costumes and sets for Streamline (1934) which Cochran’s biographer, Charles Graves, considered 'one of the most beautiful productions that Cockie ever staged’. With Anna, she was commissioned to execute a 10 metre panel for the liner Queen Mary illustrating the theme of 'entertainment’; they also painted murals for the Queen Elizabeth .

During World War II, the Zinkeisen sisters were among the artists commissioned by Imperial Chemical Industries to do paintings for a prestigious advertising campaign (“a landmark in advertising and art history”). Early in the war they worked as auxiliary nurses at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and Doris was later sent by the Red Cross and the St John’s Ambulance Brigade to Belgium, France and Germany as a war artist. After the war she continued to work in London as a theatrical designer, at least until 1972, and to hold occasional exhibitions of her paintings. Her daughter is the illustrator Anne Grahame Johnstone.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan
Callaway, Anita

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011