Johanna Marie Fosie

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Johanna Marie Fosie, (1726-1764), was a Danish painter, the first professional native female artist in Denmark.

[edit] Biography

Born as child of painter Jacob Fosie, she learned to paint by her father together with her sibblings Michael Fosie and Elisabeth Fosie, who was a teacher in drawing in his home. Johanna was the most talented, and signed and publicated illustrations in her fathers drawing book in 1741. Of her drawings, several is preserved in Kobberstiksamlingen, on Rosenborg, in Kunstindustrimuseet and in private collections. In 1757, she gave a still life oil painting as a gift to the king.

Fosie lived in her parents home until her marriage, where her parents held a salon for artists, who gattered among others the artists J.M. Preisler, Gustav de Lode and Michael Keyl, the painters Hörner and C.G. Pilo, the sculptor Simon Carl Stanley, the phoet C.F. Wadskiær and several other writers, and where she became a celebrated artsit in social life and from where she made her drawings and paintings. She was particularly clos to Hörner, who painted her with a pensil in her study, illustrating her as the first female artist in Denmark, her brother and later her husband and who seemed to have had an inluence in her art. In 1758, she married the vicar Jens Eriksen Westengaard. After her marriage, her activity as an artist lessened, but she did not stopp althogether.