At the northernmost point of Denmark, jutting out towards Sweden, sits Skagen, a remote village known not just for its lively trade in herring but also as a place of austere natural beauty. For centuries, visitors have flocked to Skagen’s beaches to see where the North and Baltic Seas meet but never mix, their convergence marked by a shift in colour and a foaming crash of waves.
In the late 19th century, many of those visitors were artists, who, bored with academy life, were drawn to Skagen – a ‘desert between two roaring seas’, as Hans Christian Andersen described it – by the promise of an arresting landscape. In the late 1870s they formed an artists’ colony known as the Skagen Painters. Not all members, however, were transplants. Among them was Anna Ancher, a Skagen local who, despite her centrality to Danish art history and a measure of international acclaim, is only now being given her first solo exhibition in the UK. Presenting some 40 works, ‘Anna Ancher: Painting Light’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery homes in on Ancher’s tender depiction of her town and, above all, her virtuosic handling of the shifting Nordic light.
Ancher was born in 1859 to the keepers of the town’s only hotel, which was frequented by travelling artists who pitched up to paint Skagen’s rugged landscapes and inhabitants. At the age of 12, Ancher met the Scandinavian artists Frits Thaulow and Holger Drachmann, but it was the encouragement and tutelage of painters such as Michael Ancher – her future husband – that intensified her interest in painting. In the mid 1870s, with the support of her family, she began lessons in Copenhagen with the artist Vilhelm Kyhn: at that time, women were not permitted to study at the Danish Academy of Art.
The first room of the exhibition takes in that early decade of Ancher’s career, opening with a small, muted self-portrait from 1879 in which the young artist gazes out confidently. Less than a year later, Ancher made her public debut in a spring exhibition in Charlottenburg with Old Man Whittling Sticks. The contemplative scene, in which a burly man works away at a hunk of wood, is a precursor to the kind of art with which Ancher would make her name, in which the light source is treated almost as a subject in itself. Be it a pale morning glow, the blush of a setting sun or the period of blue light that colours the atmosphere before dark, the light in Ancher’s paintings commands attention.
Inspired by trips to Paris in the 1880s, where she saw the plein air works of Monet and other Impressionists, Ancher revisited the subtle variations of light in her home town again and again. Unlike her male contemporaries, who captured Skagen’s changing sky in scenes of weathered fisherman working against the furious sea, sand sticking in the paint, Ancher’s paintings have a softer, more domestic focus. The people in her paintings – the working woman in Maid in the Kitchen (1883/86), the patient mothers and squealing children in A Vaccination, Study (1898/99) – are shown completing mundane tasks, painted without drama or exaggeration. In that era, domestic life was deemed the preferred subject for women painters, but the exhibition suggests that, rather being forced in this direction, it was Ancher’s connection to her community that drew her to the seamstresses, the teachers, the maids and farmers scratching out an existence in rural Skagen.
The light in these paintings streams in through windowpanes or shines bright through linen curtains but is best captured in pared-back studies such as Evening Sun in the Artist’s Studio at Markvej (c. 1913). This sketch-like painting, depicting a corner of Ancher’s workspace with a pattern of amber squares of light cast upon the adjacent wall and rendered in impasto, has become a totem of her practice, though she never exhibited the work publicly. Here it is hung frameless, its periwinkle hue standing out against the gallery’s flaxen walls. Nearby, Sunlight in the Blue Room (1891) shows Ancher’s young daughter Helga in her grandparents’ hotel; the vivid painting, with its inky blues and rich golds, was met with mixed reviews. One critic likened Ancher’s ‘attempt’ at the scene to the failed flight of Icarus. Nevertheless, Ancher’s handing of light, as made clear in four brief videos halfway through the exhibition, was the source of significant praise and she continued painting even when others suggested she focus on motherhood.
Walking through the exhibition’s narrow rooms is to follow Ancher’s art not chronologically but thematically, moving from private domestic scenes to greater gatherings of community. Among the most personal works here are small portraits of the artist’s mother, Ane, in her old age. Mrs Brøndum in the Red Room (c. 1910) is an expert study in colour, the woman cloaked in a scarlet blanket almost indistinguishable from the surrounding walls, while The Artist’s Dead Mother (1916) is a tender portrait of Ane in repose on a bed of white.
In the final room, Ancher’s experiments in landscape painting are represented by a series of small studies. In Moorland (n.d.) a green plain stretches out beneath a candy-coloured sky, while Blue Sunset (n.d.) captures a rare moment of stillness on a Skagen beach. Ancher also explores a more Symbolist style in Grief (1902), a sombre scene, said to be drawn from a dream, of an elderly woman in funerary clothes next to a nude girl, both seated in front of a grave marker amid the Skagen heathland. Its striking quality is matched by A Field Sermon (1903), in which a preacher delivers a sermon to a crowd shielding themselves from the elements among the sand dunes. This ambitious scene – which presents 27 figures, more than in any other of Ancher’s paintings – is the work of an artist who remained committed to her community. The faces here are rendered by Ancher with same sense of familiarity present in her earlier paintings, and, should this subtle show meet with the success it deserves, they will become known to an entirely new audience.
‘Anna Ancher: Painting Light’ is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 8 March 2025.