Anna Massey Lea Merritt (September 13, 1844 – April 7, 1930) 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.
Anna Massey Lea was born in 1844 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of an affluent Quaker couple, Joseph Lea and Susanna Massey, and the eldest of six sisters. She studied anatomy at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. In 1865, the family moved to Europe, where she took art lessons from Stefano Ussi, Heinrich Hoffman, Léon Cogniet and Alphonse Legros. They moved to London in 1870 to escape the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1871 she met Henry Merritt (1822–1877), a noted art critic and picture conservator, who would become her tutor and later, her husband. They married 17 April 1877 but he died 10 July the same year. She had no children and did not marry again.
Merritt spent the rest of her life in England, though with frequent trips to the USA, with exhibitions and awards in both countries, becoming a celebrated artist. She exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She died on 5 April 1930, in Hurstbourne Tarrant, Hampshire.
In 1894–95 she painted the walls of St Martin's Church, Blackheath village, using a new technique of painting on dry plaster using silicone-based paints to counter the effects of damp. The paintings are of scenes from the life of Christ.
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.
