Anna Hen-Yosifova

Anna Hen-Yosifova was born in Germany in 1872 and trained there as a painter, first at the arts-and-crafts school in Braunschweig and then in the Dutch city of The Hague, where she learned the old discipline of the flower still life. She exhibited across Germany, in Dresden, Chemnitz and other cities, before her life turned on a marriage.

She married a Bulgarian and in 1900 moved with him to Sofia, the capital of a young country whose painters were busy with portraits, peasants and history and had barely touched the still life. Hen-Yosifova made it her own. Working in oil and watercolour, she brought the carefully arranged vase of flowers into Bulgarian art as a serious subject, and joined the modern Contemporary Art association there.

She went on showing in Munich, Liege, Zagreb and Belgrade, and died in her adopted country in 1931. For decades afterward she was almost entirely forgotten, until a retrospective gathered dozens of her paintings and drawings again more than a century after she was born.