Anna Syberg (née Hansen) (1870-1914)

Anna Hansen was the daughter of master painter Peter Syrak Hansen and was born and raised in Faaborg in a prosperous and artistic home. She received drawing lessons at the Technical School in Faaborg, where her father taught. At the age of 19, Anna Hansen travelled to Copenhagen to pursue an artistic career at a time when “painting ladies” were not welcomed in art academies. In Copenhagen, she was accompanied by her sister Marie, who was training as a parliamentary stenographer, her friend Alhed Warberg – whom she knew from South Funen and who later married Johannes Larsen – and Franziska Eriksen, Fritz Syberg’s sister.

Together with Alhed Warberg, she received drawing lessons from the sculptor Ludvig Brandstrup and from the painter Karl Jensen. Both Anna Hansen and Alhed Warberg were, at times, employed at the Royal Porcelain Factory, as they also needed to earn a living.

Anna had known Fritz Syberg since he arrived at Mesterhuset in Faaborg as a newly trained journeyman painter. They were married in 1894. The Syberg couple lived in Svanninge on South Funen from 1894 to 1902, after which they moved to Pilegården near Kerteminde, close to their close friends Alhed and Johannes Larsen.

Flowers in watercolour
Anna Syberg’s primary artistic medium became watercolour, which she fully embraced at the beginning of her marriage. Flowers became her preferred subject, and she developed a free and imaginative approach to depicting them, breaking with conventional ways in which flowers had previously been painted.

In 1898, she made her debut at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition with flower watercolours and sold two to the industrialist Hirschsprung’s collection. She also received grants from the Academy in 1902-03, and in 1905 she was awarded the Raben-Leventzaus Scholarship of 500 kroner. In short, an artistic career was underway, though it was challenged by everything that came with her marriage to Fritz Syberg: Six children and the responsibility for a large household and many guests.

There was, however, also time for study trips together with Fritz, including to Berlin, Florence, Amsterdam and Paris, while friends and family looked after the children. For extended periods around 1900, the entire family stayed at Johannes Larsen’s family estate in Båxhult in Sweden, and from 1902 to 1910 they spent their summers at Fyns Hoved under free and very primitive conditions.

The Empty Chair
The establishment of Faaborg Museum in 1910 led to a dispute between Anna and her brother, Peter Hansen. The manufacturer Mads Rasmussen, who financed the museum’s acquisitions, left it to the painters themselves to decide what should be purchased. And when the painters – all men – made the selections, not many works by women were acquired. In fact, Peter Hansen and Jens Birkholm had it entered into the record that they voted against the acceptance of works by Alhed Larsen and Christine Larsen (Swane), and Peter Hansen also voted against works by Anna Syberg.

Anna wrote angrily to Peter:

”Dear Peter, how do you behave. You voted against me at the Faaborg Museum based on loftly ideal notions of safeguarding the interests of art in Denmark. ’You would not conceal from me,’ you wrote, ’that I and the other ladies had no significance for Danish art.’”

In Peter Hansen’s large painting of the inauguration of the Faaborg Museum, Anna Syberg’s chair therefore stands empty.

Happy years in Italy
In November 1910, the entire Syberg family travelled to Pisa in Italy, where they lived for nearly three years, and they would likely have stayed longer had Anna Syberg not become pregnant with her seventh child, who was born after their return home in October 1913.

The following year, Anna Syberg fell ill. She suffered from gallstones and was advised to undergo surgery. She was operated on in early July 1914 and died two days later from complications following the operation, at just 44 years of age.