The model for these depictions of petites femmes fatales was Elbe. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel. Larssen suggested the name Lili, and by the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented with that name as a woman, attending various festivities and entertaining guests in her house. Įlbe started dressing in women's clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb's model, actress Anna Larssen, who on one occasion was late for a sitting. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists' Fall Exhibition), at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d'Automne in Paris. They travelled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman by posing as Gottlieb's sister-in-law. They worked as illustrators, with Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. Gerda came from a conservative family as her father was a vicar in the Lutheran church.
Poplars along Hobro Fjord, 1908 - an example of Lili Elbe's work as a landscape painterĮlbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and they married in 1904 when Gottlieb was 19 and Elbe was 22.