The Norwegian artist Asta Elise Jacobine Nørregaard studied painting in Germany and France in the latter half of the 19th century. Born into a modest bourgeois family, she grew up with her father and sister in Kristiania (present-day Oslo). She received her first education at Knud Bergsliens (1827–1908) art school at the age of twenty and was noticed early on as a talented student. This is also where she encountered Harriet Backer (1845–1932), another promising Norwegian artist. From 1875 she continued her schooling in Europe, first in Munich and from 1879 in Paris. In Munich, she was trained in the academic tradition, still life, figure studies and drawings and reproductions of renowned European paintings. As women were not admitted to most academies at the time, she received private lessons from the Norwegian painter Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928).

In Paris she approached a more academic realism. She took lessons from Gustave Courtois (1852–1923) at Académie Colarossi and attended life drawings at Madame Trélat de Vigny’s atelier. For a period the French painters Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Léon Bonnat (1833–1922) were her private teachers, and an increase in portrait paintings is noticeable from this period. This includes her small-scale self-portrait I Atelieret [In the studio, 1883] where she depicts herself painting an altarpiece in her private Parisian studio. This altarpiece (1883) was a prestigious assignment for a Norwegian church in Gjøvik. She was the first woman artist in Norway to receive an official commission for a religious work, and In the Studio documents this important step in her career. By giving priority to the large canvas, showing herself with palette and brushes in her hand, A. Nørregaard underlines her position as a professional practitioner in the field.

During her stay in Paris, A. Nørregaard produced a varied range of historical paintings, genre pictures, portraits, and landscapes, primarily in an academic-realistic style, but she also approached impressionism, as we can see in her painting Lesende kvinne ved åpent vindu [Woman reading by an open window, 1888]. Pastel portraits eventually became her major focus after returning to Norway in 1884. Her models were mainly women and children from the Norwegian upper class. Although one of her earliest pastels was the portrait of a young Edvard Munch (1885), she usually painted men in oil on canvas. In 1920, her most prominent assignment was achieved; to paint the first portrait of the new Norwegian monarch, King Haakon VII. The portrait was a great success, and she was honoured with the King’s Medal of Merit for her significant contribution.

Additionally, A Nørregaard was the first Norwegian artist to produce and publish her own catalogue of paintings, called Portraeter [Portraits, 1911]. She produced 4 volumes altogether, containing about 200 photographs of her work.