Anna De Weert

Anna De Weert, née Cogen; Anna Virginie Caroline De Weert, also known as Anna De Weert-Cogen (27 May 1867, Ghent – 12 May 1950, Ghent) was a Belgian painter, prose writer and essayist. She is mainly known for landscapes painted in the Impressionist style referred to as Luminism which emphasizes light effects. She also made a number of designs for book illustrations. As a writer she wrote mainly essays and artist biographies in the French language.

Life De Weert was born in Ghent as Anna Virginie Caroline Cogen. Her father Eugène was a doctor. Her mother, Clara Ledeganck, was a Dutch-language writer of poems, sketches and stories. Her maternal grandfather was Karel Lodewijk Ledeganck, a law professor, politician and writer who supported the movement that fought the suppression of the Flemish language in Belgium.

After her father died when she was two, she was raised by her extended family and in particular her mother and grandmother. She grew up in an intellectual and artistic environment. From an early age, she was interested in both drawing and literature. Her paternal uncles, Alphons and Felix Cogen, were successful painters. She attended the Institut de Kerchove and later studied at an industrial school for two years, as women were not yet admitted to the Ghent Academy at that time. In 1895, she moved into a new studio at a farm which she had bought in Afsnee near Ghent, beside the river Lys. The farm had previously belonged to a Dominican Monastery. She painted the farm in which he had her studio around 1909.

Emile Claus painted her portrait in a landscape in 1899.

Work Anna De Weert was a productive artist and had a long association with the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in her home town after she first exhibited there in 1895. In 1927, she wrote an overview of Belgian and Flemish art from 1300 to 1900 for an exhibition in London that same year. She gave countless lectures throughout the country about her travels, about art and especially about Emile Claus. She further published books on her uncle Alphonse Cogen (1922) and Emile Claus (1926).

Death and legacy She died in Ghent in 1950. In her will she left her paintings together with a work by George Minne and two old masters to the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent.

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