American painter and printmaker active in Great Britain. She lived and worked abroad most of her life in Britain, working as a professional artist for most of her adult life. She painted portraits, landscapes and religious scenes. She was born the daughter of an affluent Quaker couple, Joseph Lea, a manufacturer, and Susanna Massey, and was the eldest of six sisters. As women were generally excluded from art academies at the time, she instead practiced art on her own, and later studied anatomy at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. In 1865, the family moved to Europe, where she took art lessons from Stefano Ussi, Heinrich Hoffman, Léon Cogniet and Alphonse Legros. Her family moved to London in 1870 to escape the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1871 she met Henry Merritt (1822–1877), a noted art critic and picture conservator, who would become her tutor and later, her husband. Merrit was twenty two years her senior. They married 17 April 1877, but tragically, he died three months after the wedding. Merritt painted her best-known work, Love Locked Out, in memory of her late husband. Love Locked Out was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890 and became the first painting by a woman artist acquired for the British national collection. Anna also edited a selection of her husband's writings for publication. She had no children and did not marry again. Merritt spent the rest of her life in England, with frequent trips to the United States, with exhibitions and awards in both countries, becoming a celebrated artist. She exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. In 1894–95 she painted the walls of St Martin's Church, Blackheath village, using a new technique of painting on dry plaster using silicone-based paints to counter the effects of damp. The paintings are of scenes from the life of Christ. Along with Mary Nimmo Moran, Eliza Greatorex and Ellen Hale, Anna Lea Merritt ranks with the greatest women American painter-etchers of the nineteenth century. Anna Lea lived and worked in an era when female artists rarely achieved prominence or financial stability in comparison to their male counterparts. She always asserted that discrimination had never blighted her career, but did write a magazine article in 1900 titled "Letter to Artists, Especially Women Artists," in which she teasingly declared that women could achieve far more in life if they, like men, were allowed to take a wife as a helpmate to perform all the mundane chores of life. Her writings survive in Love Locked Out: The Memoirs of Anna Lea Merritt.
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