Anna Ancher

Biography

Anna’s mother, Ane Hedvig, liked to tell how her daughter was born on the very night Hans Christian Andersen stayed at the Brøndum family’s inn. That, she said, was why the child must have a gift for art. The story has proved durable; it is hard to check, but it has stayed in family retellings for good.

Anna Kirstine Brøndum was born on 18 August 1859 in Skagen, a fishing village in the north of Jutland. Her father, Erik Andersen Brøndum, was a merchant and kept the hotel, and her mother came from a family that read and thought a great deal about religion. Anna was the fifth of six children. When she was about fifteen, Danish and Norwegian marine painters began to come to Skagen, and she saw their pictures in her own home. In 1874 she met Michael Ancher at the hotel.

Women were not admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1875–1878 she spent three winters at Vilhelm Kyhn’s private school of drawing and painting in Copenhagen. Later she studied in Paris with Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, together with Marie Triepcke, the future wife of Peder Severin Krøyer. In 1879 Scandinavian artists looking for work in the open air gathered in Skagen; among them were the Norwegians Christian Krogh and Frits Thaulow. Krogh, researchers write, influenced her development too.

In 1880 she made her debut at the Charlottenborg exhibition with “Lars Gaihede Whittling a Stick” (Skagens Museum), whose realism was noticeably sharper than that of Danish painting at the time. On her twenty-first birthday she married Michael Ancher. A daughter, Helga, was born in 1883. Marriage did not make her give up work, although housekeeping was what was expected of married women.

Her first pictures, such as “Blue Ane” (1882) and “The Girl in the Kitchen” (1883–1886), were painted in restrained dark tones and told of the hard life of local people. Later her palette grows lighter. She was interested in Dutch interiors of the seventeenth century, and liked to paint a room as though nothing existed beyond it. The people of Skagen were also her main models: her relations with them came more easily than those of the visitors. Most often it is a single woman in a room, occupied with some quiet task or lost in thought; she almost always looks down, has closed her eyes or turns her back, and the viewer never meets her gaze. For their silence and intimacy her canvases are compared with those of Vilhelm Hammershøi. Of “Evening Prayer” (1888) she wrote to acquaintances that it was concerned only with colour. On a trip to Paris with her husband in 1888–1889 she was drawn to Manet and other French artists, and among the Skagen painters she came closest to the Impressionist idea of light as the main subject.

A separate theme is the religious life of Skagen, which she alone of the whole Skagen circle painted. Her mother and sisters were deeply caught up in the Inner Mission, a pietist revival movement, and as a girl Anna went with her mother to Bible readings and prayer meetings, while the artists around her were mostly freethinkers. Hence “A Missionary Meeting” (1903) and the church scenes. “Sorrow” (1902), in which she showed herself naked on one side of a cross and her mother with hands folded in prayer on the other, is read by scholars as a trace of this division; she herself, as far as I know, never commented on anything of the kind.

The most complex of her compositions is “A Funeral” (1891). Its origin: as early as 1878 her first exhibited picture had shown a poor couple, Per and Stine Bollerhus, returning from church. Many years later she attended Stine’s funeral and gathered her impressions in a low-ceilinged room flooded with light, where blue, pink and green tones meet. No one in this picture looks at the viewer.

Anna Ancher exhibited regularly and travelled with her husband to Vienna (1882) and Paris (1885 and 1888–1889). Her pictures earned her a silver medal at the Paris World’s Fair (1889), the Eckersberg Medal (1903, 1904), the Ingenio et Arti medal (1913) and the Tagea Brandt Travel Grant (1924). Over her lifetime she showed work at Charlottenborg 54 times. Her pictures were also seen abroad, for instance at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Critics wrote about her a great deal, but often together with her husband, and Holger Drachmann called her “the Mrs” and singled her out as a woman artist with a “special sensitivity”.

In 1884 the couple bought a house on Markvej in Skagen; in 1913 a studio was added to it to designs by the architect Ulrik Plesner.

Michael Ancher died in 1927, and Anna on 15 April 1935 in Skagen, where she was born. In 1938–1939 the sculptor Astrid Noack made a bronze statue of her, unveiled on the eightieth anniversary of her birth. Her daughter Helga left the house with all its contents to a foundation, and since 1967 it has been open as a museum.