PETERSEN, Anna - b. 1845 København, d. 1910 København

Danish painter. She grew up in comfortable circumstances and was afforded what was then, for a woman, the rare opportunity to train as a painter. She began her training in Copenhagen at the Design School for Women and later went to France where she was apprenticed to Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905) in Paris. She returned to Copenhagen and in 1890 she studied at Women’s Art School which had been newly established by the Academy of Fine Arts in 1888.

Petersen initially focused mainly on figure painting with some portraiture, but slowly developed her interest in genre art; her works depicting common people at home or in church are among her most successful.

In 1883 she made her debut at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition, and she exhibited there again several times until 1910. During the 1880s she exhibited her works abroad several times, for example, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. She visited Skagen in 1889 and made several trips to Italy during the 1900s.

Petersen struggled to find a place in the male-dominated Danish art world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her work fell out of fashion and she was largely forgotten until the end of the 20th century when the Hirschsprung Collection and Statens Museum for Kunst acquired some of her more important works.

Breton Girl Looking After Plants in the Hothouse

The girl looking after plants in a hothouse is not, in fact, looking after anything while she is being painted. This may be because she is modelling, but also because she has an inner life of such strength and fervour that she cannot simply just toil. In the 1880s, painting women with inner lives of their own clearly demonstrates how women are arriving at a new sense of self-worth. This woman is her own mistress, and she knows how to cultivate nature. She lives at a time ripe for replanting in order for new flowers to grow - both at a concrete level and metaphorically.