Anna Massey Lea Merritt was an American painter and printmaker active in Great Britain. She painted portraits, landscapes and religious scenes. She was born in Philadelphia but lived and worked abroad most of her life in Britain. Merritt worked as a professional artist for most of her adult life, 'living by her brush' before her brief marriage to Henry Merritt and after his death.
Merritt painted her best-known work, Love Locked Out, in 1890, in memory of her husband who had died in 1877 just three months after their wedding. She had hoped to have the image, a portrayal of Cupid standing before a locked door, done in bronze as a monument, but could not afford it. Merritt initially resisted allowing the painting to be copied despite innumerable requests, because she feared the subject would be misinterpreted: "I feared people liked it as a symbol of forbidden love," she wrote in her memoir, "while my Love was waiting for the door of death to open and the reunion of the lonely pair". Though Merritt was already a recognized working artist, she had intended to end her professional career after her wedding, but she returned to painting after her husband's death. Although she was American, 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 through the Chantrey Bequest.
In 1900, Merritt wrote that she felt she had not faced much if any discrimination because of her gender, but noted the social pressures which could inhibit a female artist's career, concluding:
The chief obstacle to a woman's success is that she can never have a wife. Just reflect what a wife does for an artist: Darns the stockings; keeps his house; writes his letters; visits for his benefit; wards off intruders; is personally suggestive of beautiful pictures; always an encouraging and partial critic. It is exceedingly difficult to be an artist without this time-saving help. A husband would be quite useless.
During the 19th century there were a significant number of women who became successful, educated artists, a rarity before that time, except for a few like Angelica Kauffman and Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The emerging women artists created works with a different perspective than men, challenged the limited concepts of femininity and created a genre of floral-female paintings, in which "the artist placed one woman or more in a flower garden setting and manipulated composition, color, texture and form to make the women look as much like flowers as possible." The approach was not used for portraits. Its form of feminine representation has largely gone unrecognized by American art scholars and conservative society ignored in response to the burgeoning "New Woman" beginning in the late 19th century. Merritt created flower-feminine paintings, noting floral-feminine symbolism employed by male artists like Charles Courtney Curran and Robert Reid, she said that she saw "flowers as 'great ladies' noting that 'theirs is the langour of high breeding, and the repose and calm of weary idleness." Merritt also pursued more traditional techniques and subject matter that were in line with what male artists pursued at the time. For example, she taught herself etching and produced a Shakespearean-influenced etching of Ellen Terry as Ophelia.
