We think we know Anna Syberg as a sedentary, pale woman from the many depictions of her as a gentle wife and mother by her husband and Fynbo painter Fritz Syberg. However, this was not the whole story, because behind painter Fritz stood the woman, the wife, the mother, the organiser, the exhibitor and the artist.
Her Marriage to Fritz Syberg and the Creation of a Career Path
Anna Syberg grew up in an artistic environment, unfettered by the accepted conventions of the day. It was here, in her childhood home in 1882, that she met her future husband, Fritz Syberg, who was working for her father as a trained journeyman painter. And it was at their home on the island of Funen that the friendships were formed between those who would later make up the Fynbo Painters. After training at a technical school in Faaborg and teaching in Copenhagen, Anna Syberg was employed as a porcelain painter at the Royal Porcelain Factory (Royal Copenhagen). She married Fritz in 1894, and they settled in Kerteminde. The author Johannes V. Jensen belonged to their circle of friends. From her time as a porcelain painter, Anna Syberg developed a kind of layer-on-layer technique that she could transfer to watercolour painting, giving life to plants and flowers like no other.
Female Fynbo Painter in Retrospective
From 1898 to 1910, and then again in 1913, Anna Syberg exhibited at Charlottenborg’s Spring Exhibition. In 1909 and 1913, she exhibited at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition, and in 1912, she was one of the six in Six Women Artists at Den Frie Udstilling (the Free Exhibition). Correspondence from the exhibition periods testifies to how the couple divided childcare and exhibition work between them. From 1910–1913, the whole family lived in Italy. Anna Syberg gave birth to seven children during her marriage to Fritz. When Faaborg Museum was inaugurated in 1910, she and the other female artists were pushed aside, especially by Anna Syberg’s own brother Peter Hansen, and it was not until after her death that she achieved real artistic recognition. In 1915, Kunstforeningen (the art society) arranged a retrospective exhibition featuring 64 of her works.