A major new exhibition at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery is showcasing the groundbreaking work of Danish painter Anna Ancher, who transformed light itself into her lifelong artistic muse in the remote fishing village of Skagen. The exhibition, titled "Anna Ancher: Painting Light," presents her innovative techniques alongside evocative period photographs of the artistic colony that flourished in Denmark's northernmost corner during the late 19th century.
Skagen, located at the tip of a long spit of land where two seas meet, was once described by Hans Christian Andersen in 1860 as a sparsely populated place where "the wind sports with the sand, and where the voices of the seamews and the wild swans strike harshly on the ear." This remote fishing village was defined entirely by maritime life, with upturned boats serving as roofs for outhouses, daily catches strung up on lines, and surplus fish scattered along the water's edge. Despite its desolate appearance, Andersen called it "dear, friendly, peaceful Skagen" and noted it was "a good warm chimney-corner" with "windows open towards every part of the world."
By the early 1870s, painters from across Europe began arriving in Skagen, drawn by its pristine white sand dunes and exceptional light quality. These artists gathered at the Brøndums Hotel, where Andersen had previously stayed, and eventually decorated the establishment's walls with paintings of one another. Anna Brøndums, the hotel owners' artistically inclined daughter, would later marry one of these visiting artists, Michael Ancher, and become a central figure in the Skagen artistic colony.
Anna Ancher may be familiar to many art enthusiasts as one of the two women in white walking along the seashore in Peder Severin Krøyer's famous painting "Summer Evening on Skagen Beach," or as a figure toasting friends in the same artist's celebrated work "Hip, Hip, Hurrah!" Both paintings are frequently reproduced on posters and greeting cards. However, this exhibition positions Ancher as the primary subject, highlighting her individual artistic achievements and contributions to Impressionist painting.
The development of Ancher as an artist exemplifies the saying that "it takes a village to raise a child." She received strong encouragement from both her family and the established artistic colony in Skagen to pursue formal painting training. While she regularly visited Copenhagen and traveled with her husband to major European cultural centers including Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Munich, and Paris to view exhibitions, her artistic focus remained steadfastly centered on her local community and its inhabitants.
The Dulwich exhibition provides viewers with an intimate glimpse into the daily lives of ordinary people in late 19th-century Skagen. Ancher's subjects included seamstresses at work, family members plucking geese and chickens, an elderly woman carefully counting money, children learning to sew, an old man whittling sticks, and a pastor delivering an outdoor sermon to a hillside gathering of solemn peasants. In an unusually progressive theme for the era, she repeatedly painted scenes of mothers and babies waiting in line for vaccinations, demonstrating her interest in contemporary social progress.
Particularly prominent in Ancher's work are repeated portrayals of her own mother, a stern-looking, devout Christian woman who never appeared without a head covering. These paintings of her mother form a compelling series that increasingly focused on themes of mortality and death as the elderly woman aged. While these character studies, often set in dark interiors and sometimes lacking sophisticated facial detail, provide valuable social documentation, they represent some of the less visually appealing works in the exhibition.
The exhibition truly excels when showcasing Ancher's impressionistic techniques, particularly her revolutionary treatment of light as a primary subject. Her most captivating and effective works are those where light itself becomes the central focus of artistic interest. "Sunlight in the Blue Room" (1891) exemplifies this approach, featuring a shaft of sunlight streaming through a window and illuminating a wall, carpet, and a blonde child's hair. Though the image appears charming and conventional to modern viewers, it provoked harsh criticism from contemporary art critics who complained that "the sitter's yellow hair is eaten up by the sun to the scalp" and advised artists to keep such "misguided experiments behind closed doors."
Undeterred by critical opposition, Ancher continued developing her fascination with light effects throughout the early 1900s, eventually establishing a signature technique for capturing luminescent brightness shining through white blinds and curtains or reflecting onto walls. A prime example of this mastery appears in "Lunch Before the Hunt" (1903), which depicts a solitary man eating in a room illuminated by a peachy golden haze that bounces off the chocolate-colored fur of a hunting dog so realistically rendered that viewers feel compelled to reach out and touch its velvety surface.
Even more striking are Ancher's paintings where the interplay of light serves as the sole subject matter. "Interior. Brøndums Annex" (1916) presents the view from one empty room into another, featuring bare floorboards, orange-toned woodwork, and the honeyed reflection of windows cast upon a wall. "Evening Sun in the Artist's Studio" (after 1913) creates a similar luminous effect using impasto technique, with vibrant, almost abstract orange rectangles daubed onto a bare blue-mauve wall to capture the effect of sunset reflected from an unseen window. These works emanate a tremendous sense of stillness and calm while achieving maximum impact through economical artistic means.
Ancher's exterior scenes cast Skagen in particularly seductive summer light, with delicate blues morphing into shimmering pinks in the street scene "Østerbyvej" (c. 1915) and in "Moorland" (undated), where three-quarters of the composition is devoted entirely to sky. These works demonstrate her ability to capture the unique atmospheric qualities that originally drew the international artistic colony to this remote Danish location.
While contemporary curators, including those organizing this exhibition, frequently use the term "radical" in exhibition materials and catalogs, this descriptor may be too strong for Ancher's gentle artistic approach, especially considering her dismissal of the women's suffrage movement as "nonsense." However, "trailblazing" accurately describes her contributions to art history. Anna Ancher was an exceptionally gifted artist who developed innovative techniques ahead of their time, often more daring and experimental than the work produced by her own husband.
Ancher's indomitable artistic spirit is perhaps best exemplified by an incident following the birth of her daughter in 1883. Her painting instructor, believing motherhood should end her artistic career, advised her to "gather up her art materials in a wheelbarrow and cast them out to sea." Fortunately for art history, Anna Ancher firmly refused this suggestion and continued developing her unique artistic vision, leaving behind a body of work that continues to captivate audiences more than a century later.
