Sophie Anderson Biography
SOPHIE ANDERSON
Paris 1823 - 1903 Falmouth
Sophie Anderson was a genre, landscape and portrait painter. Her subjects were mostly domestic scenes and she showed a particular talent for portraying children. She also developed a special affinity with Italian peasant imagery during her residence in Capri.
The daughter of the French architect Charles Gengembre and his English wife, Sophie Anderson was born in Paris. She studied under Baron Alexander Joseph Steuben (1814-1862) who was renowned as a painter of genre scenes and portraits. With the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, these studies were brought to an abrupt end. The Baron fled back to his native Russia, and Anderson and her family left for America. She established herself in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh as a successful portrait painter and married Walter Anderson (flourishing 1856-86), an English landscapist.
In 1854, the artist and her husband came to England. She made her début at the Royal Academy with a religious painting in 1855. Anderson provided five illustrations to Howe's Historical Collections of the Great West and many of her works were engraved for the Illustrated London News. Anderson exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York, and in Britain at the Royal Academy from 1855 to 1896, the British Institution, the Royal Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street and at the Grosvenor Gallery. While in England she lived in London, Dalston in Cumberland, and Bramley, near Guilford, but around 1871 she moved to Capri because of ill health. Eventually in 1894, she returned to England and lived in Falmouth where she died.
The work of Anderson is represented in the Birmingham City Art Gallery and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool