Emmi Leuze-Hirschfeld (1884 - 1976)

Born in Vienna in 1884, she attended the École des Arts et Métiers. In 1905, at the age of 22, she moved to Concarneau and met her first love, the 38-year-old Russian painter Emil Bénédiktoff Hirschfeld. They got married the following year and moved into their new residence called "Ker Loar" not far from Le Gout Gérard. They lived in Concarneau until the death of her husband in 1922. Emmi was then 38 years old. No doubt to drown her sorrows, she decided to set off alone to discover the world: Morocco, Tunisia, Tahiti, Spain, South Africa, Mozambique... She never stopped travelling but always returned to Brittany, her adopted home. She paints genre scenes and portraits. She is a happy and luminous personality, with a "virile and sincere" style of painting, as the journalist Giffard wrote, "she observes nature with intelligence and affection, she notes with accuracy the subtle play of light".