Anna Ancher was a Danish painter. She is admired for her paintings of interiors filled with light and color, influenced by Impressionism. Ancher is regarded as a legendry and inspiring artist in Danish art as well as among other European art circles.
Background
Anna Ancher was born on August 18, 1859, in Skagen, Frederikshavn Kommune, Nordjylland, Denmark. She was the daughter of Erik Andersen Brøndum (1820 – 1890) and Ane Hedvig Møller (1826 – 1916). Her father was the owner of the Brøndums Hotel and merchant’s shop. Anna was the fifth of six children in the family.
Education
As a woman, Ancher was not allowed to enroll at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. She attended Vilhelm Kyhn’s school of painting for women in Copenhagen from 1875 - 1878. She also studied at the workshop of artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in Paris from 1888 – 1889. During the course of education she developed a style of her own. She was also one of the first to observe the interplay of different colors in natural light.
Career
Anna made her debut as a painter at the Spring Exhibition of 1881 at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, but before then she had already painted Lars Gaihede Whittling a Stick. In 1884, the Anchers, with their one-year-old daughter Helga, moved into the house, which today is the best preserved artist's house in Denmark. For the first fifteen years, they were relatively poor. Though Michael became known as Skagen's most authentic painter of fishermen, his works did not sell until around the turn of the century.
Unlike her male colleagues, Anna Ancher painted mostly indoor scenes and portraits. She loved Skagen's sun but liked it best when filtered through curtains or a row of green plants on a windowsill. Her famous "The Maid in the Kitchen" shows bright sunlight flooding the room through yellow curtains while a standing woman has her back to the viewer. As Ancher developed her style, light became the major feature of her paintings, demonstrated in the series featuring the blue room of Bröndum's Hotel, which was her mother's quarters.
Anna Ancher never moved far away from her mother's hotel. With the exception of her studies in Copenhagen and Paris and a trip to Vienna with her husband in 1882, she lived and died where she was born.
Anna Ancher was a member of the Skagen Painters, a group of Scandinavian artists who were dedicated to capturing the natural beauty and life of this fishing town.
Personality
Helga Cathrine Ancher, daughter of Anna Ancher, describes her as "A poetic nature and very bright, but she took on the guise of servant and strove from morning till night by the stove. She was very beautiful. Yet I remember her dressed up only once in a grey silk dress with a grey hat and red carnations. She had made a promise to God on one occasion when she feared the family would go bankrupt that if He would help, she would always work in her kitchen to His honor, and she did. First up, last to bed, dressed in the humblest of clothes, providential to the poor, she struggled on till she was eighty years old."
Quotes from others about the person
Walter Schwartz in his work on the village of Skagen and its importance to Nordic painting writes: "Among European painters, Anna Ancher is one of the few women of consequence...She is the exception to the rule that great artistic innovators are men. In Nordic painting she stands alone…. She has inspired no school of painting; her specific talent was a sense of color, an inborn gift which can as little be transferred to others as can red hair or personal charm."
Connections
In 1880 Anna Brøndum married Michael Peter Ancher. They had a daughter.