Anna Ancher (pronounced ‘anchor’) is arguably Denmark’s most famous woman painter.
This is the first UK exhibition devoted to her art, so hats off to Dulwich Picture Gallery. The exhibition features over 40 paintings, among them several of her most celebrated masterpieces, as well as numerous photos of Ancher and her family, and some works by contemporary Danish women artists.
Impressionism Anna Ancher’s dates are 1859 to 1935, so she was coming of age (20 or so) in the late 1870s, early 1880s. Impressionism was at its peak in Paris – the internet tells me that:
The heyday of Impressionism was primarily the 1870s and 1880s, a vibrant period when Paris-based artists like Monet, Renoir, and Degas held independent exhibitions, defining the movement’s focus on light, modern life, and visible brushstrokes, with its core activity often cited from around 1867 to 1886.
Light And Ancher visited Paris in the late 1880s where she studied under Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and was exposed to Impressionism, significantly influencing her interest in light and colour.
Naturalism But alongside the purely technical lessons of Impressionism, some contemporaries were working in a more Naturalist vein i.e. using modern impressionist techniques to depict scenes of everyday life, especially work, with a kind of gritty realism. I will suggest that Ancher’s work oscillates between these two poles, impressionism and realism.
Modern Breakthrough Ancher was a key figure in the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’ movement, seeking to depict everyday life with honesty and authenticity.
Skagen Painters Anna Ancher was born and raised in Skagen (pronounced ‘Skane’) on a remote, windswept part of the Danish coast. At the time it had a large fishing industry, a rugged dangerous job, and the landscape, the sea air, the ‘authentic’ local peasants and fishermen, all these attracted artists keen to experiment with new subject matter and techniques. And so grew up the Skagen Painters, a community of like-minded artists. There were eventually quite a few of them and they painted the local area and people, did portraits of each other, had affairs and relationships, kept diaries and letters. Exhibiting and publishing all this is now a small cottage industry.
Native Ancher differed from all the other Skagen painters by virtue of having born and raised there. Her parents were comfortably-off middle class people who kept a boarding house. Although she travelled to study in Paris, once she got going as an artist, she focused almost entirely on the people and places of her home town, with many paintings depicting local working people, peasants or fisherman; while most f her works depict family members, in the garden of the boarding house or in her own home. The overall impression you get is of quiet homely calm, charm, and domesticity.
Michael Ancher Oh and Ancher wasn’t her original surname. She was born Anna Brøndum. Ancher is the surname of the man she married, Michael (pronounced ‘Mick-ale’) Ancher, who was also a painter. Michael painted realistic outdoor scenes in a style sometimes so close to Anna’s that there are a number of paintings whose attribution scholars, to this day, are unable to decide.
But on the whole Michael was more on the naturalist end of the spectrum – from an internet search it looks like he did lots of paintings of the hard-bitten local fishermen, a subject Anna rarely touched.
The exhibition includes photos of the pair together and Michael comes over as a very handsome man, in one photo blown up to fit on the wall, sporting an amusingly oversize beret.
My view: two styles
Having reviewed the 40-plus works on display here I think Anna’s paintings fall into two main groups, with a few side categories. Either they are about light, or about people. The realistic works depicting people go out of their way to contain fairly detailed facial portraits. They have faces you can discern and interpret. They tend to be about people doing things.
By contrast, the other, larger, group is about light. These are interested in catching the effect of light, sometimes through windows on walls, sometimes out of doors onto trees and flowers. These light paintings also have people in them but it was noticeable that their faces mattered a lot less if at all. The entire treatment tends to be more sketchy and impressionistic and this extends to sometimes making the faces just patches of flesh coloured daubs.
Here’s what I mean. First what I’d call a more realistic or naturalist work, women plucking geese.
Plucking the geese by Anna Ancher (1906) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
Here the focus is on the activity and so on the bodies, and if you’re going to go into that much detail about actions and bodies, then you need detail about clothes (I was struck by the metal rings in the belt of the bloke on the right) and you need faces.
(Socialist realism Incidentally, two or three of these works, the ones depicting groups of people at work in a fairly realistic way, reminded me a little of the style of Socialist Realism which became the official style in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, worthy, uplifting, realistic depictions of working people. The dignity of labour. Honest working folk in a worlds which is always sunny and positive.)
Impressionism Here, by contrast, is a much more obviously impressionist work, much more a case of daubs and dabs because the overall purpose isn’t the detail of postures, let alone faces, but the play of dappled sunlight.
Helga Ancher and Ane Torup on the Garden Bench by Anna Ancher (c.1892) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
In practice
In practice Anna’s works are more mixed than my simplistic binary; it’s more that my binary establishes a kind of spectrum along which you can place her works.
And it’s the light side of her work which the curators of this exhibition, and all the articles you read about Anna, emphasise. They emphasise that while her husband and many of their friends in the Skane Painters community were realists, realistically depicting the locals, and Anna stood out from all of them for her interest in light, and light in interiors. These are what she’s most famous for.
Sunlight in the blue room by Anna Ancher (1891) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
To quote the curators about this one:
She was interested in capturing different times of day, often depicting the same subject multiple times with only subtle variations. In Sunlight in the Blue Room (1891), one of Ancher’s most important paintings, light becomes almost tangible, illustrated with thickly painted squares on the back wall of the room.
Exhibition layout
Room 1
Eleven paintings establish Anna’s tone and style, including one of her most famous, ‘Maid in the kitchen’.
The Maid in the Kitchen by Anna Ancher (1883–1886) Courtesy of The Hirschsprung Collection
In works like this, of solitary women engaged in a quiet domestic task, set against a window through which comes golden light, you can feel a homage to Jan Vermeer, painting two and a half centuries earlier (1632 to 1675), though refracted through all the changes in social attitudes and painting technique which had come in between.
Room 2
Ten photos of Anna and her family, alongside 15 paintings including the geese plucking. At the end of the room is the wall-sized photo of Anna and Michael, both smiling, making a very handsome couple. This room also contains one of her most famous paintings, ‘Harvesters’.
The Harvesters by Anna Ancher (1905) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
On the face of it this is about rural work but there’s not much sense of sweat and labour, is there? Instead it’s all about sunlight, sunshine, sunshine from a lovely blue sky illuminating the idyllically golden wheat. If you compare and contrast this with the tortured wheatfields of Vincent van Gogh (6 years older than Anna) it makes you realise how idyllic and paradisiacal Ancher’s world is, how light and depthless.
And can you see what I mean by socialist realism? The image is idealised and incredibly worthy. These are good people living the good life.
Mausoleum
Between the first two and the last two galleries at Dulwich Picture Gallery, is the small Mausoleum space, I’ve been in bigger stationery cupboards. As usual the curators have set up a video screen and on it play four short films in a loop. Here’s one.
Room 3
Ten paintings, mostly of family: very quiet and peaceful interiors, and the impressionist garden paintings. The friend I went with really liked the depiction of her two old sisters because of the sense of quiet companionableness, the sense that she really knew these people.
After the day’s labour by Anna Ancher (1917)
Incidentally, this painting demonstrates another difference between the realist and the impressionist works which is that the impressionist works look better from a distance. Up too close you can see the daubs and swathes of paint which have a disillusioning effect. But if you step back 3 or 4 or 5 yards, the paintwork becomes indistinct and you just get the overall effect, and this is the better way to view the works which are concerned with light. Whereas, as I’ve suggested, with something like the geese pluckers, for sure there’s the overall composition to enjoy but there’s also interest is in the realistic detail.
Room 4
Room 4 contains seven paintings, including one of her largest, The Field Sermon which the curators tell us is considered her masterwork.
A Field Sermon by Anna Ancher (1903) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
Well, yes and no. At first glance it is definitely one of her realist works, with some of the figures beautifully rendered with realistic detail, such as the three blokes down the bottom, with their beards and hats, and some of the old ladies. But if you go up close to look at some of the faces you realise that they’re very patchy: some are persuasively rendered, others not so much. And then stepping back again, the composition becomes less persuasive the more you look. To me it felt as if the figures had been cut out of a magazine and moved about on a not very persuasively depicted grassy hill. But my friend loved it, uncritically loved it; said the random spacing of people is exactly what happens in real life. Well, you pays your money…
The other striking picture in the last room represents a complete departure because 1) it depicts a nude and 2) it is a symbolist work.
The dozen or so photos in the exhibition, plus all the ones in the four films, really bring home how many clothes the Victorians wore, how completely covered up almost every inch of flesh apart from hands and faces were. Lacking film or TV or billboards depicting scantily-clad women, they lived in a world of fantastic prudery about the naked human body. Almost the only place you would have seen naked women was in an art gallery.
Anna’s paintings all follow the conventions of Victorian good manners and good taste, all her paintings depict ladies in the maximum number of layers of frilly fabrics, quietly reading in quiet interiors or in sunlit gardens. Except for this one, which is why it comes as such a surprise and shock.
Grief by Anna Ancher (1902)
What makes it symbolist is the fact that, unlike the strict realism of everything else Ancher painted, you would simply never, in reality, have a naked young woman kneeling by a grave anywhere in the western world. It is a purely imaginary construct. And the other big indicator is the proximity of Death, the great Symbolist subject.
The painting makes its effect at a distance, but this is clearly on the Realist end of the spectrum and so it’s worth going up close to check out – maybe the face and hands of the old lady – but mostly Ancher’s way with the fleshtones of the nude, the light coming in from the left falling on the woman’s back giving it a yellow sheen, and highlighting the pink soles of her feet; and then the folds of skin on her front and tummy, and the shadow across the right side of her arm and tummy; and then the hair! The way the vivid imagining of the body and the incredibly skilful use of paint and composition, all go to create a powerful image.
The scholars think Ancher might have used her own daughter, Helga, as the model for the young woman, the same Helga who appears in the idyllic impressionist work shown above, ‘Helga Ancher and Ane Torup on the Garden Bench’ from 1902. Quite a journey, in imaginative scope, in subject matter and style, and for the mother and daughter.
Conclusion
Once I’ve finished a first walk through of an exhibition, I always walk back through towards the beginning, playing a game with any friend I’m visiting with, to select just one work from each room. There were easily two or three from each room. Ancher’s work is of a consistently high standard, and is varied enough to keep your interest. Some of the light works are phenomenal, the air of quiet sunlit domesticity is extremely calming and civilising, and the more realistic works are vividly persuasive.
But overall I wasn’t really, really thrilled. Many of her pictures make good posters and postcards, wonderfully decorative, extremely skilful – but nothing that cut through to my heart.
You’ve heard the expression Scandi noir which, Google AI tells me, is used to describe:
a dark, moody genre of crime fiction, film, and TV set in Scandinavian countries, known for its bleak landscapes, complex plots, and deeply flawed protagonists investigating brutal crimes that often reveal hidden societal issues beneath a calm surface.
Well, Anna Ancher is a good example of Scandi blanc, a term I’ve just invented to indicate:
a bright, sunlit genre of art set in Scandinavian countries, known for its luminous landscapes, simple domestic settings, noble workers, soulful ladies in billowy white dresses, quietly reading sensitive novels in bower-like gardens dappled with sunlight or in rooms lit with golden glows, indicating a perfect society embodying calm and peace and beauty.
Sunlight in the garden.
A Girl in the Garden in Summertime. Skagen by Anna Ancher (1914) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
Golden interiors.
Interior. Brøndum’s Annex by Anna Ancher (1916) Courtesy of Skagens Museum
Related links
- Anna Ancher: Painting Light continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 8 March 2026
- Dulwich Picture Gallery YouTube channel
- Anna Ancher Wikipedia article
- National Museum of Women in the Arts Anna Ancher exhibition
- Guardian review
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