Fanny Ida Mina Frey
Born in 1872.
Died in 1940.
Fanny Ida Mina Frey (9 November 1872, Aarau — 10 June 1940, Zürich) is documented as a painter and, according to the sources, was self-taught.
Born into a household in which Carl Frey is mentioned as a Stadtrat, she grew up in a family environment marked by public responsibilities. The biographical notice refers to a childhood shared with four siblings and notes that her mother possessed an artistic aptitude said to have been passed on to her daughter.
Her “Pensionsjahre” took her both to Welschland (French-speaking Switzerland) and to England; these stays complete the brief outline of her education.
In May 1897, she married Maurice Schindler and followed her husband to Meninki, Russia, where he assumed the technical management of a large textile company and where two of their sons were born. In 1901, the family moved to the village of Reichenbach in Lausitz, Saxony. Two years later, in 1903, the couple returned to Switzerland and settled in Flawil, where her husband took over a cotton-twisting mill (Baumwollzwirnerei).
The years spent in Flawil are described in the records as particularly happy ones for Fanny; it was there that the two sons grew up, and that a third boy died shortly after his birth.
In 1916, her husband sold the factory, and the family moved to Rüschlikon, to a house with a large garden. When her children reached adulthood, she travelled extensively — notably on trips organised by the Volkshochschule — and, shortly before the First World War, visited nieces in Cyprus.
Attentive to her education throughout her life, she attended the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition almost daily in order to document herself and keep informed.