This week's theme on the Post is seaside architecture, prompted by the holiday season and by the recent publication of 20th Century Seaside Architecture: Pools, Piers and Pleasure Around Britain's Coast by Kathryn Ferry. as well as the fact that so many characters in fiction from Jane Austen's Persuasion onwards spend time at the seaside. The long Promenade forms the backdrop to Jane's restorative stay in Blackpool with Mrs Briggs in High Wages (1930), with Blackpool Tower (built 1894, seen here in 1920) then, as now, the resort's central feature. 

Doris Zinkeisen (above, standing, with her sister, 1954) was widowed in 1946 and moved to Suffolk, where she lived with  her twin daughters Janet and Anne Graham Johnstone, neither of whom married and both of whom became well-known children's book illustrators. There she returned to painting theatrical high society subjects until her death in 1991. She is remembered for the unusual parallel artistic career she shared with her sister (something her own daughters replicated) and the way their work "encompassed the extremes of twentieth-century experience: from the glamour and pleasure of high society and theatreland, to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust". 

In her role with the British Red Cross, Doris Zinkeisen was one of the first artists to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated by the British Army in 1945. She had been commissioned to record what she saw for the British public, and her painting 'Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945 (1945, IWM) is one of the most shocking images of war. This is Doris with the painting on her easel in 1945.

In 1945 the Joint War Organisation commissioned Doris Zinkeisen to work as a war artist recording the activities of the North West Europe Commission in supporting the post-war repatriation, relief and rehabilitation of prisoners of war and civilian internees. She travelled by lorry and air to different locations and painted in a temporary Brussels studio. This image shows the British Red Cross relief team issuing comforts to prisoners of war at an air strip in Brussels before repatriation (1945, British Red Cross).

Doris Zinkeisen and her artist sister. Anna (1901-76), both won scholarships to the Royal Academy Schools, and pursued successful careers as designers and society painters. In WWI they volunteered as VADs and again in WWII with St John Ambulance Brigade at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. It is the contrast between the glamorous worlds of theatre, film, and galleries, and "the stark realities of wartime hospitals and post-war relief efforts" which makes Doris's work in particular so interesting. "Brushstrokes from the front lines'' concentrates on her time as one of the few female official war artists. This is is Casualty Reception (c1942, Museum of the Order of St John).

There was a sadly all-too-brief exhibition in London in May entitled "Doris Zinkeisen and the British Red Cross: Brushstrokes from the front lines". Fortunately, though, an excellent book was produced to coincide with the week-long show which concentrated on her work as an official war artist and presented a fascinating contrast with her glamorous personal image and pre-war society portraits. This is her famous Self Portrait (1929, NPG).

In the Netherlands, Volkstuinen, or allotments, date back to the C17th and today there are now around 240,000. They can often be seen from trains; the allotment-spotter will note that one significant difference between allotments in the UK and those in many European countries is that structures - cabins, sheds, summer houses - are permitted. As a result, these allotments fulfil many different social, creative, and familial roles, and not just the growing of fruit and vegetables.