Portrait of an artist

By Beth Frank | Photography by Ray Schmuland

Ursula Zandmer's passion was art. Through painting, she realized her identity and achieved self-expression. By the age of 83, she had painted more than 300 canvasses—dark, emotionally evocative portraits and bold abstracts with a hint of primitive style. The paintings were never displayed, however, because her husband, Herbert, refused to let her sell them—he said he loved them too much to let them go. Instead, they piled up in a storage facility until Herbert died in 1999.

After his death, Ursula began thinking about her own legacy. Born in Berlin in 1917, she knew she had wanted to be an artist early on. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, and later graduated from the Los Angeles Art Institute. After moving to Calgary with Herbert, an oil and gas entrepreneur, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Calgary in 1971, majoring in art. She reconnected with the faculty in her later years.

Ursula and Herbert had no children. When she died at age 86 last year, Ursula left an estate of $6.25 million to the U of C’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, in honour of Herbert’s career in the oilpatch. It is the largest estate gift ever received by the U of C.

Her bequest included her collection of paintings and the request that some of them be displayed on campus so that they would be, finally, seen by eyes other than her own and Herbert’s.

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