Anna Sofia Palm de Rosa was a Swedish artist and landscape painter. In the 1890s she became one of Sweden's most popular painters with her watercolours of steamers and sailing ships and scenes of Stockholm. She also painted a memorable picture of a game of cards in Skagen's Brøndums Hotel while she spent a summer with the Skagen Painters. At the age of 36, Anna Palm left Sweden for good, spending the rest of her life in the south of Italy, where she married an infantry officer.
Palm de Rosa was one of 84 artists who signed a letter in 1885 calling for radical changes in the Swedish Academy's teaching which they considered to be outdated. She nevertheless exhibited at the Academy in 1885 and 1887 and from 1889 to 1891 taught watercolour painting there. She was also a member of the recently formed association: Svenska konstnärinnor together with Eva Bonnier, Hanna Pauli and Mina Carlson-Bredberg. The watercolours of marine scenes with steamers and sailing ships she painted around this time contributed to her rising popularity. She began to produce numerous small vedute to satisfy her many customers while also painting scenes of the city of Stockholm. On New Year's Eve 1895, at the age of 36, she left Sweden never to return. After spending a year in Paris, she moved to Italy where she met her husband to be, Infantry Lieutenant Alfredo de Rosa. After their wedding in Paris in 1901, the couple moved first to Capri, then finally settled in the Madonna dell'Arco, district of Sant'Anastasia, near Naples in 1908. In addition to scenes of Italian life, she continued to paint landscapes of Stockholm including scenes of Gustaf Adolfs torg with the opera building as well as views of the 1897 Art and Industrial Exposition in Stockholm. The only explanation for her interest in such recent developments is that she must have received photographs from Sweden as a basis for her paintings. She may well have used of photographs taken by the Stockholm photographer Frans Gustaf Klemming, who also was behind some of the oil painting of Robert Lundberg, but she probably drew on views taken by various photographers. During the First World War when her husband was called up, Palm de Rosa became extremely productive in her painting, especially in Baiae on the Gulf of Naples where she spent a year. After the war, she grew increasingly frail until her death in May 1924. Her work is represented at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Gothenburg Art Museum and Uppsala University as well as at museums in Norrköping and Helsinki.
