ANNA ANCHER – Painting Light

 By Jane Farrington.

ANNA ANCHER – Painting Light

Dulwich Picture Gallery 4 Nov 25 – 8 Mar 26

 

Perhaps it is not surprising to learn that this is the first exhibition on the Danish artist, Anna Ancher to be held in the UK.  Scandinavian art is poorly represented in British public collections and women artists of past centuries have been routinely side-lined and neglected.  However, when an intrepid group of FLAG members arrived at Dulwich Picture Gallery on a dark, wet January day, the exhibition was buzzing with visitors and it is not hard to see why.

 

Ancher lived and worked for most of her life amongst the impoverished fishing community of Skagen on Denmark’s northernmost tip.  She became a central figure in a colony of artists known as the Skagen Painters and it is, I think, significant the she was the only member of the group to be born and raised in Skagen.  Looking at her work, it seems that the bleak, flat landscape with it pale northern light and the lined weather-beaten faces of the inhabitants are part of her own life-blood.  That close connection comes across in the variety of subject-matter she tackled – landscapes, the seashore, portraits and scenes of everyday life – and the warmth and empathy that she portrays.  This particularly comes out in her depiction of light which is subtly present even in the darkest cottage interiors.  Soft beams of sunlight glow through gauze curtains, creep across tiled floors and along white-washed walls and flicker over the faces of young and old.  Solitary female figures in domestic spaces recall Vermeer and her portraits, particularly of elderly sitters, have a Rembrandt-like humanity in their tenderness.  I particularly admired a small-scale head and shoulders portrait of an elderly fisherman.  His rough, weather-beaten face and intense, anxious gaze conveyed vividly the harsh, isolated way-of-life at Skagen.

 

Nevertheless, Ancher was not isolated in her own life, travelling with her husband in Europe and, most significantly, spending some time in Paris in the 1880s.  Her observation of reflective rainbow colours on, for example, a white tablecloth or a painted garden bench show the impact of French Impressionism.  Like the Impressionist painters, the most ordinary, everyday subjects she chose to depict, have a glowing luminosity which convey so vividly a particular time and place – her own world.