Anna Petersen

Petersen was born on 20 February 1845 in Copenhagen. She grew up in comfortable circumstances and was afforded what was then, for a woman, the rare opportunity to train as a painter. Kasper Monrad, a senior research curator at Statens Museum for Kunst, believes that there are few Danish female artists known from Petersen's time because it was difficult for them to gain access to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; it would have been inappropriate for them to paint male nudes and socially acceptable subjects were limited, with still life, particularly flowers, seen as most appropriate. Petersen began her training in Copenhagen at the Tegneskolen for Kvinder (Design School for Women) and later went to France where she was apprenticed to Jean-Jacques Henner in Paris. Henner believed she showed promise as an artist. She returned to Copenhagen and in 1890 she studied at Kunstskole for Kvinder (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 her time, Petersen was acknowledged for her strong sense of realism. Stylistically her work is reminiscent of Hans Smidth, L. A. Ring and Niels Bjerre, She also exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, where she met up with Willumsen and other Nordic artists including a large contingent from the Skagen Painters. Petersen began to doubt her abilities and slowly lost the courage to exhibit; at the same time, her work fell out of fashion and no museums were interested in buying her work during her lifetime. The first major purchase of her work was in 1991 when the Hirschsprung Collection acquired Under gudstjenesten (1890). and is buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen. ==Works==

(lying down), Jeanna Bauck and Marie Krøyer Petersen's 1884 painting Breton girl looking after plants in a hothouse () takes a subject that was traditionally thought appropriate for women to paint: plants, and subverts it so that the focus becomes the Breton girl that is tending them. There are hints of an underlying darkness in the picture; the overturned pot among the hothouse plants is a motif of death and the girl appears both vital and tightly constrained; Her painting En Aften Hos Veninde. Ved Lampelys (An Evening with Girlfriends. By Lamplight) from 1891 has drawn attention because an investigation by the Hirschsprung Collection after it acquired the picture revealed that the women were all contemporary artists, the Danish painters Marie Krøyer and Bertha Wegmann and the Swedish painter Jeanna Bauck are sat listening to the Danish violinist Frida Schytte. The discovery that Petersen had gathered together these Scandinavian pioneers for the movement for women's right to express themselves in the arts imbued the painting with a certain emblematic quality. The Hirschsprung Collection held a small exhibition in 2009 focusing on Petersen's work, which up to that point, had largely been forgotten, and included the picture again in a 2015 exhibition of the work of seven female artists held celebrate the centenary of the introduction of women's suffrage in Denmark. Claus Grymer, writing for Kristeligt Dagblad in a review of the 2012 "Masterpieces of the Hirschsprung Collection" exhibition at the Ribe Kunstmuseum noted that the painting showed a certain ambiguity; it is not clear if the women are intent on the music or lost in their own thoughts. Petersen produced only one known piece of sculpture, a monument for her parents' grave in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen; it is possible that she was taught to sculpt by Willumsen or another friend, Carl Johan Bonnesen. ==Notes==