Anna Dorothea Therbusch

Anna Dorothea Therbusch was born Anna Dorothea Lisiewska on 23 July 1721 in Berlin, the daughter of Georg Lisiewsky, a court painter. She trained in her father's workshop and developed her early skills by studying and copying paintings in the royal collections, including works by Antoine Watteau and Nicolas Lancret. She had no formal academic education in the modern sense; her training was the apprenticeship model typical of the period.

She went on to become court painter to the Elector Palatine at Mannheim, and her reputation as a portraitist and history painter grew across German speaking Europe. Her first application to the Paris Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was reportedly rejected on the grounds that the submitted painting was too accomplished to have been made by a woman, but she was admitted in 1767. She was also elected to the Vienna Akademie der bildenden Künste and held membership in the Académie des Arts in Stuttgart, though the exact years of those two admissions are not confirmed in the sources reviewed. Her mythological history paintings won the favor of Frederick II of Prussia, for whom she painted, at points signing her work as painter of the king.

She continued to paint and take commissions until her death on 9 November 1782 in Berlin. She is buried in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin.

Therbusch's standing rests heavily on the honors of her own century: admission to the Paris academy in 1767, despite an earlier rejection on the grounds that her work was too accomplished for a woman to have made, together with membership in the academies of Vienna and Stuttgart, was an exceptional distinction for a woman painter of her time.

Later feminist art history revisited her work more critically. Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker's Old Mistresses, 1981, observed that her surviving output leans toward portraiture rather than the large multi-figure history paintings she aspired to, attributing this in part to the restricted access women painters had to anatomical study. The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin's 2021 to 2022 exhibition, mounted for the tercentenary of her birth, framed her instead as one of the most important women artists of the 18th century and a forerunner of women's emancipation in the arts, reflecting a modern reassessment built substantially on Berlin's own holdings of her work.

Therbusch's auction market is thin and not well documented at the level of individual lots. Artprice records 34 public auction appearances under the name Anna Dorothea Liszewska-Therbusch, and HENI's market data cites roughly USD 610,000 in cumulative auction sales over the past 27 years, including about USD 38,400 in sales over the most recent five years. The specific work, auction house, sale location, and exact date behind her highest individual sale are not confirmed in the sources available, so no single all-time auction record can be published with confidence at this time. The great majority of her documented output sits in museum collections rather than in private or market circulation.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Therbusch, and her market is thin: the great majority of her documented paintings sit in institutional collections in Berlin and other European museums rather than moving through the trade. Auction activity is limited to roughly three dozen recorded lots, and the specifics behind her highest reported sale figure are not independently confirmed, so any auction based valuation should be treated with caution. Provenance research and the scholarly literature, particularly Christina Lindeman's monograph on the artist, are the more reliable basis for evaluating any work offered as hers.