One of Denmark’s greatest artists gets first large-scale exhibition in the UK at Dulwich Picture Gallery – Southwark News

On a drab winter’s day, Danish artist Anna Ancher’s Painting Light collection at Dulwich Picture Gallery is the perfect antidote, writes Barbara Buchanan…

Light suffuses her paintings to the point where her subjects almost seem to melt away Icarus-like in the sun. 

Ancher (1859-1935) is regarded as one of Denmark’s greatest artists, yet she is hardly known here.

This is the first time her work has featured as a large-scale exhibition in the UK.

Light and colour dominate; in the first room of the exhibition, she portrays her daughter Helga knitting in Sunlight in the Blue Room (1891).

Sun streams through the windows, bouncing off the back of Helga’s blonde bob onto the wall. The shadows of the windowsill plants are brought into sharp relief and light dances on the blue-beige striped carpet. 

On the same wall is Ancher’s unframed Evening Sun in the Artist’s Studio at Markvej, after 1913, where she explores the rays of a low-lying sun filtering through the window. The sun is reflected on the opposite pale blue wall with thick brush strokes of peach and tangerine orange square panes. The effect is reminiscent of Claude Monet’s sunrises, an artist who influenced her after her six-month stay in Paris in 1889. 

The painting is in stark contrast to the dark colours she uses in one of her earlier works, depicting a Skagen fisherman concentrating on his craft in Old Man Whittling Wood, 1880. The piece won her critical acclaim as a promising artist, she was 21 at the time, and it is signed Anna Brøndum. It is in keeping with the realism style of the many artists who stayed at her parents’ Brøndum’s Hotel. They were attracted by the rugged terrain of Skagen on the northern most tip of Jutland where the Baltic and North Seas meet.

Anna started sketching when she was 12 with her future husband Michael Ancher encouraging her to persist and become a painter. Despite her conservative Lutheran background, her mother backed 15-year-old Anna’s decision to go to Vilhelm Kyhn’s school for gifted female painters in Copenhagen.

Anna’s whole family, she was one of six, supported her by cooking meals and looking after her daughter at a time when women were expected to give up artistic endeavours after marriage and childbirth.

She was a creative force worth nurturing, breaking the restrictive rules of her male contemporaries. Anna would paint the same domestic interior at different times, experimenting with changes in the play of light that verge on abstraction.

Among the most personal of Ancher’s paintings are those depicting her mother Ane as a solitary figure. We see her lost in her own thoughts, grieving over the untimely death of her firstborn daughter and on her own deathbed.