Anna Maria Thelott

Anna Maria Thelott (1683–1710) was a Swedish artist, and one of the first self-supporting and professional female artists in Scandinavia. She was an engraver, an illustrator, a woodcut-artist, and a miniaturist painter.

Biography and career

Anna Maria was the child of the artist Philip Jacob Thelott the Older, originally from Switzerland, and the sibling of the artist Philip Jacob Thelott the Younger, and worked as a child with her brothers and her father in her father's studio in the work in illustrating the works of Olof Rudbeck the Older, "Campus Elysii" and "Atlantica"; soon, she started to contribute to the household by taking assignments herself and performing different artistic works for money, thereby becoming an independent artist.

The family originally lived in Uppsala, but moved to Stockholm after the great fire of Uppsala in 1702. In her father's old age, he lived with Anna Maria, not her brothers, and it was she who supported him after he could no longer work himself.

Anna Maria was a manysided artist, versatile and talented in many areas. She performed woodcuts, and engravings at the side of drawings and illustrations of both allegoric and religious motives, miniatures and pictures of both animals and landscapes. She made eleven woodcuts of German cities with texts for the paper Posttidningen in 1706. and was frequently hired to illustrate the works of Johan Peringskiöld.

In 1710, Anna Maria Thelott became one of the many victims of the last plague in Sweden, and died in Stockholm at the age of twenty seven.

In the university of Uppsala, a sketch book of Anna Maria Thelott is preserved, made between 1704 and 1709.

See also

References