Sophie Anderson

Sophie Anderson came to art as an autodidact

Sophie Anderson, born Sophie Gengembre Anderson in Paris in 1823, was the daughter of the French architect Charles Antoine Colomb Gengembre and an Englishwoman. She spent her childhood in Paris, where her parents cultivated a friendship group of artists and intellectuals. At the age of seven, she showed an enthusiastic interest in the fine arts, could draw and paint, but was mostly only self-taught. Anderson studied for a short time in Paris with the portrait and history painter Carl von Steuben, whose move to Russia brought a premature end to her education. She made the acquaintance of other artists and received a little instruction from them, but she was essentially left to her own devices in her artistic development. The upheaval of the February Revolution in 1848 prompted the Gengembre family to emigrate to the USA, and in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sophie met the British genre painter Walter Anderson, whom she later married. 

Marriage to Walter Anderson and success in London

In October 1849, Sophie Anderson was able to exhibit a selection of portraits, figural and landscape pictures in the Western Art Union Gallery, of which a three-panel scene of Victorian London with the title The Ladder of Love, depicting the secret tryst of a couple in the warm light of the summer moon, was particularly well received. In 1851, Henry Howe included some illustrations by Sophie Anderson in the Historical Collections of the Great West. She worked on a series of portraits of protestant Episcopal Bishops with her later husband Walter Anderson, and the couple married in Manchester, Pennsylvania, where Sophie Gengembre Anderson worked for the company of the lithographer Louis Prang. The couple moved to London in 1854, where Sophie celebrated increasing success with exhibitions in the Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy. In 1858, the Andersons returned to Pennsylvania for a few years, before they final settled in London in 1863.

Fertile years on Capri and artistic legacy

As a result of persistent health problems, in 1871 Sophie Anderson moved with her husband to the Island of Capri, the former artist’s colony, which served as a place for self-realisation for artists such as John Singer Sargent, Frederic Leighton, Edouard Alexandre Sain and Walter McLaren. In the Villa Castello, surrounded by a large garden, the Andersons often gave parties and thus grew a lively artistic exchange. As a painter, Sophie Gengembre Anderson was still very productive, and created numerous paintings in the Neoclassical style on Capri. In 1894, the couple returned to England and settled in Cornwall. 

Sophie Anderson died in Falmouth, Cornwall on 10 March 1903, two months after her husband. In 2008, her picture No Walk Today was sold for over 1 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London.