Her grandfather was the writer Karel Lodewijk Ledeganck and her uncles, Alphons and Felix Cogen, were successful painters.

[1] In the 1890s, she was a private (pro bono) student of the Belgian painter Emile Claus.

[2] In 1895, she acquired a new studio as she had bought a farm at Afsnee near Ghent, beside the river Lys, which had belonged to a Dominican Monastery.

[3] Anna Cogen was a productive artist[5] and had a long association with the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in her home town after she first exhibited there in 1895.

In her will she left the painting of her to the museum in Ghent together with a work by George Minne and two old masters.