Sophie Anderson 1823-1903

Sophie Gengembre was the daughter of an eminent French architect and his English wife. She was born in Paris and raised in rural France, but visited England in 1832 and 1843. It was not until 1848 that the unrest in France drove the family from their homeland across the Atlantic to America where she established herself as a successful portrait painter. It was in America that she met and married Walter Anderson (fl.1856-1886), an English artist of domestic subjects who enjoyed moderate success but is now little known. Sophie and Walter moved to England in 1854 and took rooms at 7 Harriet Cottages on Enfield Road in Dalston, a quiet and semi-rural enclave off the Kingsland Road in Hackney. Sophie began painting in earnest for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1855 to which she submitted and had accepted Virgin and Child and for the Royal Society of British Artists, where he exhibited Head of A Young Girl and An American Market Basket. Her most famous work No Walk Today was painted at Harriet Cottages in 1855 and predates the family’s move to a more fashionable residence at Merton Road in Kensington in 1856. Sophie was already commanding high prices for her pictures, as is exemplified in the sale of An American Market Basket for the enormous sum of £315 in 1855 and Prophesy of the Destiny at the Royal Society of British Artists exhibition of 1856 for £80.

Although images of childhood had not been uncommon in the eighteenth century and artists like Reynolds and Romney had painted many dramatic and charming portraits of infant sitters, in the Victorian period there was a proliferation of images of children. Susan Casteras has explained the importance of youth as a subject in her book on the subject, Victorian Childhood; ‘The popularity of sentimental genre pictures in Victorian England is well established, and narrative paintings with nineteenth-century subject matter were produced by some of the most important artists of the period. Filled with incident and detail, such paintings depended upon a mixture of stylistic exactitude and calculated emotion to achieve their success with viewers… Society sanctioned the Victorian veneration and rediscovery of childhood in art and allowed adults to experience again or re-awaken memories of their own children’s youth in ways that were not fully understood in pre-Freudian times. And while there is undoubtedly an element of escapism and wishful thinking in such narrative pictures, there is also a lot to be learned. Perhaps it is a nearly universal adult need in Western cultures to preserve and promote the myth of childhood in predominantly rosy terms, in order to satisfy the need for emotional continuity between art and life and to enable people to cope with the joys and sorrows of the past and the present.’ (Susan P. Casteras, Victorian Childhood, 1986, pp. 4, 6)