Anna Mary Howitt was the eldest surviving child of the prolific Quaker writers and publishers William Howitt (1792–1879) and Mary Botham (1799–1888).
She was born in Nottingham, but spent much of her childhood in Esher.
When she was a teenager the family moved to Heidelberg, as her parents felt Germany offered better educational options than England.
Howitt showed early talent and entered Henry Sass's Art Academy in London in 1846, where her contemporaries included William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Thomas Woolner.
In 1847 she illustrated her mother's book "The Children's Year".

In 1850 Howitt accompanied her fellow artist Jane Benham to Munich, where she studied under Wilhelm von Kaulbach.
She also began to publish articles about the city that were later collected into An Art-Student in Munich (1853), as well as serialised stories with her own illustrations, which appeared in the Illustrated Magazine of Art (1853–54).

An Art-Student in Munich was a success.
According to The New York Times (11 May 1854), "All that is peculiar to Munich, – its museums, galleries, festivals, and works of art, – or to German life, whether in high or low degree, and still more to the cultivation of the artist, is told in these pages with a beautiful earnestness and a naive simplicity, that have a talismanic effect upon the reader.
It is one of those sunny works which leave a luminous trail behind them in the reader's memory."
Howitt was under twin influences at this stage in her life, being "connected on the one hand with the social and publishing circles of her parents, the hard-working pillars of the London literary establishment, and on the other hand with a group of forward-looking, feminist women of her own age."

The younger group with whom Howitt associated consisted of the Langham Place feminists, notably her close friend the artist Barbara Leigh Smith.
The pair joined Rossetti's Folio Club.
Howitt made her exhibition debut at the National Institution of Fine Arts in 1854, with a painting inspired by Goethe's Faust.
Her painting The Castaway (Royal Academy, 1855) was unusual in depicting a woman who has sunk into prostitution.
In 1856 she helped Leigh Smith to collect signatures for a petition that would lead to the Married Women's Property Act 1870.
Family accounts record her distress over criticism from John Ruskin of her ambitious painting of Boadicea, which was also rejected by the Royal Academy.
This may have contributed to her retreat from the professional art world, but her own account, published under a pseudonym in Camilla Dufour Crosland's Light in the Valley: My Experiences of Spiritualism(1857), suggests a neurological event, perhaps the onset of frontal lobe epilepsy.
Anna Mary Howitt was the eldest surviving child of the prolific Quaker writers and publishers William Howitt (1792–1879) and Mary Botham (1799–1888). She was born in Nottingham, but spent much of her childhood in Esher. When she was a teenager the family moved to Heidelberg, as her parents felt Germany offered better educational options than England. Howitt showed early talent and entered Henry Sass's Art Academy in London in 1846, where her contemporaries included William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Thomas Woolner. In 1847 she illustrated her mother's book "The Children's Year".
In 1850 Howitt accompanied her fellow artist Jane Benham to Munich, where she studied under Wilhelm von Kaulbach. She also began to publish articles about the city that were later collected into An Art-Student in Munich (1853), as well as serialised stories with her own illustrations, which appeared in the Illustrated Magazine of Art (1853–54).
An Art-Student in Munich was a success. According to The New York Times (11 May 1854), "All that is peculiar to Munich, – its museums, galleries, festivals, and works of art, – or to German life, whether in high or low degree, and still more to the cultivation of the artist, is told in these pages with a beautiful earnestness and a naive simplicity, that have a talismanic effect upon the reader. It is one of those sunny works which leave a luminous trail behind them in the reader's memory." Howitt was under twin influences at this stage in her life, being "connected on the one hand with the social and publishing circles of her parents, the hard-working pillars of the London literary establishment, and on the other hand with a group of forward-looking, feminist women of her own age."
The younger group with whom Howitt associated consisted of the Langham Place feminists, notably her close friend the artist Barbara Leigh Smith. The pair joined Rossetti's Folio Club. Howitt made her exhibition debut at the National Institution of Fine Arts in 1854, with a painting inspired by Goethe's Faust. Her painting The Castaway (Royal Academy, 1855) was unusual in depicting a woman who has sunk into prostitution. In 1856 she helped Leigh Smith to collect signatures for a petition that would lead to the Married Women's Property Act 1870. Family accounts record her distress over criticism from John Ruskin of her ambitious painting of Boadicea, which was also rejected by the Royal Academy. This may have contributed to her retreat from the professional art world, but her own account, published under a pseudonym in Camilla Dufour Crosland's Light in the Valley: My Experiences of Spiritualism(1857), suggests a neurological event, perhaps the onset of frontal lobe epilepsy.
Anna Mary Howitt