Elisabeth Baumann

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was an outsider in Danish art twice over, a woman in a field run by men and a foreigner besides. She was born near Warsaw to a family of German descent, trained at the academy in Düsseldorf, then travelled to Rome, where she met the Danish sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau and married him in 1846.

She painted portraits and historical scenes, and she was ambitious about showing them. In 1852 she exhibited in London, and Queen Victoria asked to see the work privately at Buckingham Palace. Among the pictures was her portrait of Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author of fairy tales, painted two years before. Later she travelled to Constantinople and Egypt and came back with market scenes and studies of women, paintings that fed a European appetite for images of the East.

Danish critics were often cool toward her, put off by her foreign background and her drive. She kept working across borders, travelling and exhibiting, until her death in Copenhagen in 1881.