Anna Howitt

Background

She was born in Nottingham, but spent much of her childhood in Esher.

Education

She then accompanied her fellow artist Jane Benham to Munich, where she studied under Wilhelm von Kaulbach.

Career

Anna Mary Howitt was the eldest surviving child of the prolific Quaker writers and publishers William Howitt (1792–1879) and Mary Botham (1799–1888). Howitt showed early talent and entered Henry Sass"s Art Academy in London in 1846, where her contemporaries included William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Thomas Woolner. She also began to publish articles about the city that were later collected into An Art-Student in Munich (1853), as well as serialized stories with her own illustrations, which appeared in the Illustrated Magazine of Art (1853-1854).

An Art-Student in Munich was a success.

According to The New York Times (11 May 1854), "All that is peculiar to Munich, - its museums, galleries, festivals, and works of art, - or to German life, whether in high or low degree, and still more to the cultivation of the artist, is told in these pages with a beautiful earnestness and a naive simplicity, that have a talismanic effect upon the reader. Howitt made her exhibition debut at the National Institution of Fine Arts in 1854, with a painting inspired by Goethe"s Faust.

Her painting The Castaway (Royal Academy, 1855) was unusual in depicting a woman who has sunk into prostitution. In 1856 she helped Leigh Smith to collect signatures for a petition that would lead to the Married Women"s Property Acting 1870.

They shared literary ambitions that resulted in Aurora: a Volume of Verse (1884).

Some contemporaries suggested that she suffered from periodic mental illness in later life. Her family was acquainted with novelist Charles Dickens, who offered critical commentary on her writing. Anna Mary Watts died of diphtheria in 1884 at Mair am Hof in Teodone (Brunico), since 1919 part of Italy, during a visit to her mother in Tyrol.

Connections

Friend:

Alfred Watts