Artist Database

Nita Spilhaus was born in Portugal to a Portuguese mother and German father and was raised by her grandfather in Lübeck, Germany after her both her parents died in her infancy. She trained as an artist at the Lübeck School of Art, then at a private art school run by German painter Friedrich Fehr in Munich, and then at an artist’s colony in Dachau, outside of Munich. Spilhaus relocated to South Africa in 1908, following her brother and uncle who had already established themselves in the Cape. Here she gradually integrated into the artistic community, joining the South African Society of Artists soon after her arrival and befriending artists like Florence Zerffi, Edward Roworth, Moses Kottler, Allerly Glossop, Pieter Wenning, Ruth Prowse, and Hugo Naudé. Spilhaus was most prolific between the time she arrived in the Cape and the early 1920s as she was working and exhibiting with these artists. In 1921, she married Ernst Simon and from 1925 to 1938 the couple lived in Munich, returning to the Cape just before the outbreak of World War II. Spilhaus slowly began to lose her eyesight in the 1950s, which left her unable to continue her art. She is well known for her landscape works and her affinity for trees and the Cape mountains.