Anna Ancher
What a series of portraits we have this week! Have you heard of Anna Ancher? She is considered to be one of Denmark's greatest visual artists. (Check the DailyArt archives for other works we have featured.)
Anna Ancher’s way of using colors was hailed as special and distinctive right from the beginning of her career. She was fascinated by intense colors: bright yellows, pinks, and purples; her choice of colors testifies to her courage to be different and to stand out from other Skagen painters.
On her travels to Paris in 1885 and 1889, as well as at exhibitions of French art in Copenhagen, Anna Ancher encountered the latest experiments with color. The French Impressionists sought to capture the flickering impressions made by the world, and in order to achieve this they began to work with the complementary colors of yellow/violet, orange/blue, and green/red, colors that reinforce each other when put together. Anna Ancher employed this practice in many of her own works. Other artists went even further than the Impressionists and began to detach color from reality altogether. One such artist was the French painter Paul Gauguin, whose boldly colored paintings Anna Ancher saw in Paris and Denmark alike.
Anna Ancher also makes these color experiments on her own. Her distinctive palette combines the wild, bold colors of Paris with the traditional, rustic colors of Danish peasant interiors: earth colors such as ochre and burnt sienna. Colors that would never be used by the Impressionists. Anna Ancher thus merges local, traditional colors with colors from the French avant-garde. This choice makes her use of color very special, reaffirming Anna Ancher’s position as one of the first modern painters in Denmark.
We present today's painting thanks to the Statens Museum for Kunst, although the painting belongs to the Skagens Museum's collection. If the museum weren't closed because of the coronavirus, you could now visit the exhibition devoted to Anna Ancher. Luckily, we can explore her works online. <3
P.S. Ancher traveled to Paris. It would be great to travel there again! Now you can visit Parisian landmarks in these ten gorgeous paintings. : )