![\"Peder](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/66163.jpeg\")
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Peder Severin Kr\u00f8yer\u2019s\u00a0Summer Evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach depicts his wife Marie talking to Anna Ancher. Main image: Ancher\u2019s The Harvesters from 1905<\/p>\n
If you had to name a single \ufefffemale painter who actually thrived during her own lifetime, then \ufeffAncher \ufeff(1859-19\ufeff35)\ufeff \ufeffmay be the one. She finds fame at the start and never loses it, despite marrying a fellow painter and raising their daughter,\ufeff Helga\ufeff. Where other \ufeff19th-century women discovered there was no room for two painters in a marriage, she lived so companionably with her husband, the Danish painter Michael Ancher (\ufeff1849-1927), that his \ufeffsilver \ufeffwedding gift to her is a double portrait in which he\ufeff looks at her with enduring love (she, of course, looks modestly away)\ufeff. There is no down period.<\/p>\n
Anna Ancher was the only member of the Skagen \ufeffpainters\u2019\ufeff colony to be born and brought up in Skagen. \ufeffHer parents, Erik and Ane Br\ufeff\u00f8ndum, owned the village inn. The night \ufeffHans Christian \ufeffAndersen came to stay in the summer of 1859,\ufeff lured, he wrote, by the roaring seas and the music of wild geese over the shifting dunes, Ane gave birth to Anna, \ufeffthe fifth of six children\ufeff. Three daughters and one son worked all their lives in the inn. \ufeffAncher\u2019s \ufeff1917 painting After \ufeffthe Day\u2019s Labours \ufeffshows two of her sisters, eyes shut in weariness, one of them head down on the polished table, exhausted in a twilit blue\u00a0room.<\/p>\n
The inn began to flourish with the arrival of more writers and artists from the 1870s onwards. It was extremely hard to reach, involving slow trains to \ufeffFrederikshavn \ufefffollowed by a \ufeff25-mile journey in horse-drawn carts along the sands. When the\ufeff Danish poet and painter Holger Drachmann first arrived in 1872\ufeff, \ufeffit took four days to slog there. Some brave souls hiked the last stretch. One of many sunlit portraits of Kr\ufeff\u00f8yer shows him cresting the dunes in walking boots.<\/p>\n
These painters stayed at the inn, which flourished into what would become \u2013 and remains \u2013 the renowned Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums \ufeffhotel. The teenage \ufeffAncher saw their canvases drying in the whitewashed bedrooms while the artists were out on the beach at their easels. She began to draw. And one day in 1874, according to a letter, Michael Ancher happened by. He is \u201cnot of the worst looking\u201d, she wrote, with true Skagen understatement.<\/p>\n
Anna Ancher began to paint in oils, encouraged by her mother, who sent her to study for three winters at a private art school in Copenhagen. Women were not admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts on equal terms with men until\ufeff \ufeff1924\ufeff. It is telling that most of the figures in Ancher\u2019s art are women, including the girl in her earliest masterpiece, \ufeffThe Maid in the Kitchen,\ufeff from \ufeff1883-86, which will be on show in Dulwich.<\/p>\n
Yellow-gold light dances through a fine muslin curtain across the window, illuminating the surfaces, glowing against walls, pooling on the wooden floor. The eponymous maid stands at the sink, a dark backlit form. Her skirt is a rich thrumming red, balancing the gold\ufeff and the darkness below. Loving its sense of order and absorption, the Danish magnate \ufeffHeinrich Hirschsprung\ufeff bought the painting on sight. It is now housed in the neoclassical \ufeffHirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen.<\/p>\n
![\"Ancher\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/66139.jpeg\")
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Ancher\u2019s only self-portrait, from 1879<\/p>\n
AB became AA when she married Michael Ancher on her 21st birthday\ufeff. Even on a chilly Jutland day, the ochre and umber church burns like an Edward Hopper street\ufeff scene, raked with American sun. The houses of Skagen are the colour of honey and butter. Look through the windows and you see glowing interiors, often lit by candles even now. Many of Anna Ancher\u2019s paintings are set in the blue or red rooms of the Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums, where she first lived, and to which she returned from the marital home next door almost every\u00a0day.<\/p>\n
The Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums \ufeffhotel is still the heart of Skagen. It would be hard to imagine a more lucid interior. The public rooms are boxes of light, opening one into the next, where guests sit at candlelit tables among paintings that were made in this building long ago, beneath elegant high windows. I ate Madame Br\ufeff\u00f8ndum\u2019s famous fish soup at a white-clothed table beneath a portrait of \ufeffAncher and her sisters, by now silver-haired, facing forwards in neat profile. They are almost identical, except for \ufeffAncher\u2019s nose.<\/p>\n
Skagen\u2019s population of less than \ufeff8,000 swells by more than \ufefftwo million over the course of the summer. Wealthy Copenhageners visit to take the sun and sea air. \ufeffSkagens Museum\ufeff is dense with worshipful crowds, coming for the Drachmanns, Anchers and Kr\ufeff\u00f8yers. The Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums \ufeffhotel is booked out, staff sweeping the sand away down long wooden corridors and serving their own eggs and cured salmon at breakfast. There is no television, no canned music. \ufeffKaren Blixen wrote much of Out of Africa here \ufeffas a long-term guest, and writers are still so attracted by its immaculate stillness that one comes annually with his own fridge so that he barely has to stir from his room. Emil\ufeff Hauge, the hotel\u2019s excellent manager, takes great care of his guests. \u201cWe do not march about in winter,\u201d he tells me, \u201cafter the visitors in shorts have gone. It is silent time, for reading, for thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nowadays, flights dart in and out of\ufeff Aalborg \ufeffairport \ufefffrom all over the world, followed by a train journey of austere beauty across the flatlands to Skagen. You can walk to the shore in moments from its orderly streets, or cycle out across the landscape to the famous \ufeffSand-Buried \ufeffchurch\ufeff, all but its stepped white tower lost to the dunes. The shores are dotted with rivals for the enchanting \ufeffhotel in Channel 4\u2019s long-running \ufeffperiod drama \ufeffSeaside Hotel \u2013 Badehotellet in Danish \u2013 a snapshot of Jutland between the \ufeffwars, before the Germans occupied Denmark.<\/p>\n
At the Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums hotel, the Nazis used the Green Room for secret operations and the Blue Room for daily gymnastics. The sacrilege will be evident to anyone who looks at \ufeffAncher\u2019s many paintings of her mother, Ane, reading the \ufeffBible, resting after her labours and finally dying, at the age of 91, in the Blue Room.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/66140.jpeg\")
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The Maid in the Kitchen will be on show in the London exhibition<\/p>\n
Some visitors still like to take the \ufeffred Sandormen \ufeffbus (which has scarcely evolved since its open-top days) along the shore to the point at Grenen. But it is a perfect walk along compact white sands, windmills and lighthouses piercing the skyline. Even now, as the temperatures begin to fall, and the bus ceases for winter, the clouds are tinged cobalt, green and coral, and the sunset is pure fiery orange as if it were still high\u00a0summer.<\/p>\n
Ospreys and sea eagles can sometimes be seen wheeling through the sky. Gr\ufeffey seals lounge along the shore. The sea runs all the way through palest opal to a colour I have never seen anywhere else, an electric blue that runs in icy beams across the waves. Hanne Aavang\ufeff of Skagens Museum\ufeff lived here for decades before a marine physicist explained this mystifying spectacle. \u201cIt is the result of a constant interplay between the reflections of these two separate seas in the sky, and back again, for ever. The light never stops fluctuating\u00a0at\u00a0Skagen.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the male artists were out on the beach, painting the water, painting \ufeffone another. But not Anna Ancher. She stays inside, always painting the light, to be sure, but within the interiors of the Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums \ufeffhotel, and then in \ufeffAnchers Hus,\ufeff where she lived with Michael, and in other rooms in Skagen. The whole village became her studio.<\/p>\n
The light never stops shifting, glowing, flickering through the windows in her art. Occasionally, you see open fields, faraway houses or a twist of cloud through the panes, but mostly they are portals of light. A seamstress stares down at her work, six amber rectangles transmitted through an invisible window on to the wall behind her. In a red-on-red study of the elderly Ane\ufeff, the gentleness of the light equates with the fading of life. There are seascapes of moon on water in this show, and of Skageners getting in the harvest in hot summer landscapes, but they look like the work of other\u00a0painters.<\/p>\n
What is so unique about \ufeffAncher is that the light arriving through windows, screening across walls, or reflecting through interiors in her work always attracts the greatest impasto: the thickest of brushstrokes for the most ephemeral of effects. Some of the paintings are unframed, made on thrifty rectangles of hessian tacked straight to the wooden stretcher, not even folding round the back. They are frail. Tor \ufeffErik Skaaland, conservator at Skagens Museum, shows me an ingenious clear\ufeff resin panel inserted behind one painting to add strength. It looks like a little window in its own right.<\/p>\n
He says that colleagues are analysing a famous double portrait of Michael and Anna Ancher staring at the day\u2019s labours, on an easel, to see if they can work out which artist painted what. \ufeffIt is not an idle pursuit, this distinguishing of Anna from Michael. His work is more finished, schooled, conventional: fishermen, beach scenes, the terrors of the turbulent seas, his wife and his many painter friends. But Anna is harder to pin down\ufeff \u2013 wilder, travelling in too many different directions. Dulwich Picture Gallery \ufeffhas chosen carefully, singling out her most individual routes.<\/p>\n
![\"Ancher\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/66142.jpeg\")
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Ancher\u2019s painting Sunlight in the Blue Room, from 1891<\/p>\n
Skagens Museum has in its collection nearly \ufeff5,000 photographs of the artists\u2019 colony and numerous paintings of painters conversing, carousing or playing cards in the dining room at Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums. This is where they went when the light had gone: the only hostelry for miles around where they could get fine food and French wine. Eavesdropping on a Danish visitor at the museum, staring at a dinner scene where all the men are raising a hearty glass over a bottle-strewn table, I heard her name every artist in the picture, from \ufeffLaurits Tuxen\ufeff with his terrific head of hair to \ufeffDrachmann with his twisting moustache, and Michael Ancher, blue-eyed and pale-bearded. But the figure she most readily identified was Anna Ancher, on the edge of events, ever-upright in her striking quietude.<\/p>\n
The dining room at Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums appears over and again. Painters sometimes paid their bills with hotel scenes. There are dining room paintings inside dining room paintings. The Skagen artists painted portraits of \ufeffone another to be inserted into a frieze running right round the room from the 1890s onwards. Artists appear against marine skies or Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums candlelight; they paint themselves laughing or furiously smoking, especially in the case of one woman marking her independence from the Skagen patriarchy (Danish women didn\u2019t get \ufeffto vote until\ufeff 1918\ufeff).<\/p>\n
Larger paintings of the waves at Grenen, say, or of card players dragging on pensive fags, were set into the wood panelling below the \ufeff81 heads that run around the top. It was in this very room that the decision was made, in \ufeff1908, to start a collection in the hotel grounds that would eventually become Skagens Museum.\ufeff And it is in that very museum that the entire dining room \u2013 wood panelling, windows, paintings, doors and all \u2013 can now be seen, meticulously taken apart and reconstructed here as a living installation after the second world war.<\/p>\n
At the centre of all these portrait heads, as if he were still running the hotel, is Ancher\u2019s brother \ufeffDegn Br\ufeff\u00f8ndum. \ufeffCigar between lips, he twinkles from the only circular portrait. Ancher appears two along, painted by Kr\ufeff\u00f8yer, face hidden inside a straw bonnet, elusive in this pageant of garrulity.<\/p>\n
Kr\ufeff\u00f8yer was quick: he could achieve a portrait in\ufeff 20 minutes. \ufeffAncher was not. Someone once described her studio as the most private room in Skagen. To reach it, you wend your way through the smaller rooms of Anchers Hus, floor to ceiling with pictures, until the rooms grow bigger with the couple\u2019s increasing prosperity, culminating in Michael Ancher\u2019s enormous triple-aspect studio. Through a door at the very end is Anna Ancher\u2019s little room, pale blue curtains against flickering sunlight, the easel exactly where it always stood, her many brushes still in their pots, a low table, just right for a child.<\/p>\n
You can see a corner of this room at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Evening sun, filtering through those curtains, sends pink-gold rays against the wall. Muted shadows shift below. There is no narrative, no tale of lost fishermen or convivial dinners, rapt seamstresses or old women reading the Bible, no figures at all. Ancher is in her element: pure light. Two canvases stand on the floor, faces turned discreetly to the wall.<\/p>\n
![\"Evening](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/66145.jpeg\")
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Evening Sun in the Artist\u2019s Studio was not painted for public display but is now among Ancher\u2019s most prized works<\/p>\n
The Danish state bought \ufeffAncher\u2019s large painting \ufeffA Funeral, \ufeffits mourners crowding into a low-ceilinged cottage, when she was barely \ufeff30. The Maid in the Kitchen came to London. She studied for six months with the \ufeffFrench \ufeffsymbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in Paris, \ufeffand the Anchers\u2019 popularity bought them a house in Copenhagen. But none of this public success is reflected in her art and she left no paintings of the world beyond Skagen, specifically the tiny enclave of her home and the family hotel.<\/p>\n
Evening Sun in the Artist\u2019s Studio, \ufeffas it is now titled, had neither name nor date. It is what used to be called an oil sketch, not made for public display. \ufeffAncher kept all such paintings out of sight, secreted away in cupboards and drawers. They are now the most prized of her works.<\/p>\n
As winter comes on, the waves get higher. The sea at twilight is a fiery silver and crosswinds plough the dunes. When I say that the shore never changes, from those paintings to this day, Hanne Aavang at the museum points out that this is entirely untrue. More than\ufeff a million cubic metres of sand shift along the coastline to Grenen every year. Nothing is quite as it was.<\/p>\n
A house on the beach, terrifyingly close to the sea, is beginning to silt up with sand. I cycle to the Sand-Buried \ufeffchurch, miles inland\ufeff, where all that remains is the white stairway of its tower. Kr\ufeff\u00f8yer, so flamboyant and merry, suffers a devastating breakdown and loses his wife to another man, dying at the age of 58. Michael Ancher dies in 1927, leaving Anna a widow in her\ufeff sixties. When \ufeff\ufeffDrachmann dies in the bitter winter of 1908, after three doomed marriages\ufeff and a lifetime of betrayals, he is \ufeffburied in the dunes at Grenen.<\/p>\n
Anna Ancher lives on, steadily painting until the spring of 1935. By then, the branch line to Skagen has been running for decades, the first cinema has already opened and closed, and vacuum cleaners have arrived at the Br\ufeff\u00f8ndums \ufeffhotel. She continues to believe that her luminous little paintings, on show at Dulwich, are so insignificant they will only be discovered long after her death. Cut off from the world on this narrow peninsula, her life encompassed in less than a mile, she goes on painting while the rest of the art world is convulsed by \ufefffauvism, \ufeffcubism, \ufeffsurrealism, \ufeffabstraction. Modern art rages onwards, but it seems \ufeffAncher does not realise that the very paintings she views as nothing more than empty sketches, to be hidden away, will one day be regarded as her masterpieces.<\/p>\n
Anna Ancher: Painting Light is at Dulwich Picture from 4 November until 8 March 2026. Laura Cumming travelled as a guest of VisitDenmark and Destination Nord<\/p>\n
Images courtesy of Skagens Museum, courtesy of Dulwich Picture Gallery, courtesy of Laura Cumming<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two seas meet at the furthest tip of Jutland\ufeff in northernmost Denmark. \ufeffThey meet but they do not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-242524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}