Jelka Rosen

Jelka Rosen (30 December 1868 – 28 May 1935) was a German painter, best known as the wife of the English composer Frederick Delius.

Helena Sophie Emilie Rosen, known as Jelka, was born in Belgrade in 1868. She was the youngest of five children born to Georg Rosen (1820−1897) and his wife Serena Anna (1830−1902), also a painter, and the only daughter of the composer Ignaz Moscheles.

Jelka Rosen studied art from 1892 at the private Académie Colarossi in Paris, accompanied by her newly widowed mother. Living in Montparnasse, she made the acquaintance of the composers Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel and Florent Schmitt and artists Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Edvard Munch and Ida Gerhardi.

She exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. She met Frederick Delius at a dinner party on 16 January 1896, and found they had a shared interest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the music of Edvard Grieg. In 1897 Delius returned from business in Florida, where had managed an orange plantation twelve years previously; he moved into her newly-acquired house in Grez-sur-Loing house owned by her and her mother, and they married in September 1903. She was heiress to a modest fortune from her distinguished Schleswig-Holstein family and her wealth gave Delius financial security.

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