Anna Sophie Petersen was one of the few women in her own lifetime who received a real education as an artist. She began at the School for Drawing and Applied Art for Women, from which she graduated in 1880. In the 1880s, she went on study trips to Rome and later to Brittany and Paris, where she was taught by the French painter Jean-Jacques Henner (1829–1905). In 1890, she was admitted to the Art School for Women at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

At first, she concentrated on painting models and portraits, but gradually she began focusing more and more on painting peasant life and gained recognition as a great realist in the style of Laurits Andersen (L.A.) Ring. As in this portrait of the sleeping peasant woman presented in a simple and unsentimental way in a very unusual perspective.

In 2003, the National Gallery of Denmark acquired its first, and so far only, painting by the artist, “Breton Girl Looking After Plants in the Greenhouse” (Inv. No. KMS8289), dated Paris 1884.