Station: [23] Anna Ancher: "Ane Hedvig Brøndum Sitting at the Table", 1910


Anna Ancher’s interiors and portrait paintings convey domestic atmospheres and a strong emotional involvement with the subjects. In this, her painting differs from the realism of other artists of the Skagen artists’ colony. In Ancher’s portrait of her mother, Ane Hedvig Brøndum Sitting at the Table, she avoids the impression of an idealising character study, instead capturing the moment of painterly recording as fleeting and quotidian. Accordingly, the writing mother does not appear as the central subject of the image; rather, the viewer’s attention is directed at the particular light conditions in the room. Under the influence of the emergent French aesthetic, colours and forms are interpreted as light reflected by the depicted objects. The light reflections vividly rendered in a few strokes on the desk in the middle of the image and the grey, blue and yellow hues making up the white of the pillow behind the sitter or the dabbed blooms of the bouquet of flowers in the right foreground clearly show Anna Ancher’s alignment with Impressionism and her modern love of experimentation.