Ruth Schmidt Stockhausen (4 April 1922 on Norderney – 22 December 2014 in Dornum) was a German painter, sculptor and graphic artist, inspired by Informalism. Life and works Ruth Schmidt was born in April 1922 on the Island of Norderney in East Frisia. Her father Albert Schmidt (1877–1940) was a military officer in charge of fortification works along the German coastline; her mother Annemarie Schmidt, née Vollenbroich (1897–1968), was an office employee by profession and a hobby painter. Ruth spent her early childhood on the island, where the painter Hans Trimborn (1891–1979) was a frequent household guest. At the age of five she contracted tuberculosis. Long stays in hospital encouraged her passion for drawing and painting. When her father was transferred to Wilhelmshaven in 1930, the Schmidt family lived there until 1941 when the bombardments during World War II made them retreat to the paternal property in the Hessian village of Stockhausen near Leun. At her father's insistence Ruth had agreed to undergo more practical teacher training in handicrafts, which she completed in Hildesheim in 1941. Teaching positions in Melle (near Osnabrück) and Lesum (near Bremen) followed. In 1944 her grant application to the German foundation for the advancement of young talent (Begabtenförderungswerk) was successful and she took part in a master class program in the fine arts, under Prof. H.W. Berger, among other staff from the Art Academy, which had been temporarily evacuated from Stuttgart to a castle away from the city. The Armistice cut the course short. Back home in her atelier in Stockhausen, Ruths main breadwinning occupation became portraiture for the Allied Forces. Her younger brother Horst Schmidt recalled that the attic of the house had turned into a kind of artist colony: Ruth shared the rooms under the roof with her cousin Giselher Neuhaus (1916–1994), a sculptor in his own right; and her elder brother Albert (1919–1996), a painter too. In 1946 she attended another drawing course by Prof. G. Kranz in Lauterbach, entered the local artist association Oberhessischer Künstlerbund, and began to exhibit her portraits and watercolor landscapes in Dillenburg, Giessen, Marburg, Wetzlar, and other cities within the province. Her signature, initially "Ruth Schmidt" or just plain "R.", made more distinguishable—and importantly—degenderized as "R. Schmidt Stockhausen", began to attract interest. In 1952 the wealthy building contractor and industrialist Hermann Lindemann (1897–1954) became her patron and procured for her and her sculptor cousin Giselher Neuhaus apartments