Gerda Wegener started as a 17-year-old at the Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Art for Women (Kunstakademiets Kunstskole for Kvinder), where she was a student of Viggo Johansen. She exhibited portrait paintings at Charlottenborg’s Spring Exhibition and the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition in the period 1904–1909. Gerda Wegener is especially known her drawings and illustrations and she had her breakthrough as an illustrator in 1908–09, where she won a drawing competition for the newspaper Politiken. She subsequently worked as an illustrator for Politiken until 1922.

Already in 1912, however, she had left Copenhagen with her partner the artist Lili Elbe to settle in the fashion metropolis Paris. Lili Elbe, who was born as a boy under the name Einar Wegener, was one of the first transgender women to undergo a sex-change operation.Gerda Wegener frequently used Lili Elbe as a model for her potraits of women, and Elbe would often paint the backgrounds for Gerda Wegeners paintings. In Paris Wegener had great success as a portrait painter, fashion illustrator, and cartoonist. Her piquant types of women with red pouts and almond-shaped eyes were in high demand among the leading women’s magazines of the time, just as her works of more erotic caracter was sought after. I

n the present landscape depicting a french street edged with slender plane trees, we recognize the elegantly undulating lines so characteristic of her work.