Michael Ancher Danish, 1849-1927

Estate of the artist
Sale: Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen, Estate of Anna Ancher, 4 May 1966, lot 92

Michael Ancher, a native Bornholmer, trained in Copenhagen before he first went to Skagen in 1874. Upon settling there later in the decade he lodged at the local inn run by the Brøndums. In 1880, he married his host’s step-sister, Anna, one of the most talented female artists of the period in Denmark.

Anna Ancher was the only one of the Skagen painters who was actually born there. She studied drawing in Copenhagen and in Paris at the atelier of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes along with Marie Triepcke, who would marry Peder Severin Krøyer, another painter attracted to Skagen. Despite pressure from society that married women should devote themselves to household duties, she continued painting after marriage.

Anna is considered to be one of the great Danish artists by virtue of her abilities as a character painter and colourist. Her art found its expression in Nordic art's modern breakthrough towards a more truthful depiction of reality, and she was intensely preoccupied with exploring light and colour. Michael Ancher was initially heavily influenced by his traditional training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1870s, which imposed strict rules for composition. His marriage to Anna, however, introduced him to the naturalistic representation of reality and its colours, for which he became known.

The Anchers played a major role in establishing the artists colony in Skagen as a centre for Nordic art. Considered in relation, Michael and Anna’s respective oeuvres shed light on the separate spheres of masculine and feminine life in Skagen. Where Anna’s artistic domain encompassed the village women (often indoors in private, engaged in domestic activities), her husband became the recorder par excellence of the local fishermen (see lot 183). His monumental portraits of them evoked the harsh, gritty outdoor life of these characters, shot through with a rugged dignity.

However, Michael Ancher also painted commissioned portraits of the wealthier members of Skagen society, for example the Holst family (see Sotheby’s London, 13 June 2002, lot 111), and of his extended family. The present work shows Anna in informal pose in the Anchers' garden in Markvej. She is half turned, giving the impression of having interrupted her walk towards the garden gate because someone called out to her, and the spontaneity of the composition generally gives the impression of a snapshot.