 She was a half-sister of the writer Norman Douglas and her maternal great-grandfather was General James Ochoncar Forbes (1765–1843), 17th Lord Forbes.At the age of nineteen, after the death of her parents, she settled in Munich, where she came into contact with the intellectual and artistic milieu around the satirical magazine "Simplicissimus".There she met and married the Norwegian painter and cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson in 1906.