Sophie Gengembre was born in 1823 at Paris in France. She was the daughter of Parisian architect Charles Antoine Colomb Gengembre and his English wife. Sophie was largely self-taught, but is known to have briefly studied portraiture under Baron Charles von Steuben in Paris in 1843. The family left France for the USA, to escape the 1848 Revolution, a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in which a number of despotic governments were overthrown. The Gengembre family firstly lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, then at Manchester, Pennsylvania, where Sophie met and married the British artist Walter Anderson – no mean painter himself. Sophie initially worked in portraiture and figure studies, exhibiting at the Western Art Union Gallery. She collaborated with her husband on a series of portraits of the Protestant Episcopalian bishops of America, the first two installments of the work being published in 1851. She also executed work for the chromolithographers Louis Prang & Co, including her ever-popular Prattling Primrose and Dotty Dimple paintings. Her early works evinced strong attention to botanical and other detail, in keeping with the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In America, she also contributed at least four illustrations to Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of the Great West – published in 1852. In 1854 the Andersons moved to London and Sophie commenced exhibiting her oils the following year. She and her husband returned to America for an extended visit in 1858 and Sophie is known to have exhibited a number of portraits at the Pittsburgh Artists’ Association. Both Andersons exhibited work at the National Academy of Design in 1860. The couple finally returned to England and settled in London in 1863. Over the next three decades, Sophie Anderson’s work was widely exhibited at venues including the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and many regional galleries. She specialised in genre painting of children and women, typically in rural settings and was one of few Victorian women to have a painting acquired by a large municipal museum. Her art was restricted to women, children and idealised domestic scenes, because that was the only subject matter acceptable for women artists in Victorian England. Of necessity, Christmas was also a recurrent them in her work. Her most famous painting in the genre being Here Comes the Gobbler depicting a rather pleased young man of the house, with a turkey over his shoulder, in the front room of a fairly well-appointed establishment. Anderson’s love of intricate detail and rendition of nature almost photographic, with flowers and leaves in her paintings being wholly naturalistic. She was also noted for her depiction of fabrics and drapery, and the use of light in her work is particularly noteworthy. Anderson was another of those Victorian artists fascinated by the world of the fairies. A good example of her work in this genre may be taken from her Take The Fair Face of Woman (1869) which portrays a golden-haired female fairy with diaphanous wings, a flowing gossamer gown and a crown of butterflies. The title of the work is taken from a line of a poem by Charles Ede. It reads: ‘Take the fair face of a woman, and gently suspending, with butterflies, flowers and jewels attending, your fairy is made of most beautiful things.’ In the early 1870s, Sophie and her husband moved to Capri for reasons of ill-health, dwelling in the Villa de Castello for 16 years. Both continued to paint, Sophie regularly sending her work back to England for exhibition. The couple returned in 1894 and settled at Falmouth in Cornwall. Sophie exhibited at the RA until 1896 and died at home on 10 March 1903, (within months of the death of her husband). Her best-known work is No Walk Today, depicting a little girl looking out at the rain sadly. The Children’s Storybook is in the collection of the Birmingham Gallery, A Neapolitan Child is at Leicester, and despite criticism of the work from contemporaries, her Elaine, or The Lily Maid of Astolat is in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool, the subject being taken from Tennyson’s poem Lancelot and Elaine. (The work may be seen in Room 8, alongside works by such greats as Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore and Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Much of Anderson’s work remains in private collections, but her paintings continue to be widely reproduced to this day. Particularly popular are The Time Of The Lilacs, Young Girl Fixing Her Hair and The Turtle Dove Small.