Skagen is a fishing village on the spit of sand at the northern tip of Jutland (Jylland) in Denmark, where painters started to gather in the 1870s. In the summer of 1874, Karl Madsen and Michael Ancher formed a group that met at Brøndums guesthouse there. They were reacting to the fixed styles of Historicism and Neoclassicism being enforced by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where Ancher and Madsen studied, and by the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts.
They were joined the following year by Viggo Johansen, and over the next two summers others joined too. Ancher married Anna Brøndum from the guesthouse in 1880, then Peder Severin Krøyer joined the group and became its unofficial leader in 1882. The Anchers lived in Skagen from 1880, Krøyer from 1894, and Laurits Tuxen from 1901. With the death of PS Krøyer in 1909, their traditional gatherings came to an end, but younger Danish and other Nordic painters continued to visit.
Oscar Björck’s painting of Madam Henriksen’s School for Girls in Skagen from 1884 shows a tiny and very personal class in this small, isolated community.
Anna Palm de Rosa’s atmospheric painting of A game of L’hombre in Brøndum’s Hotel from 1885 shows a late-night session of this popular card-game between two couples staying there.
Among the group were:
- Anna and Michael Ancher,
- Marie and Peder Severin Krøyer,
- Karl Madsen,
- Laurits Tuxen,
- Carl Locher,
- Viggo Johansen,
- Thorvald Niss,
- Oscar Björck (Sweden),
- Johan Krouthén (Sweden),
- Christian Krohg (Norway),
- Eilif Peterssen (Norway).
From the left, moving around the table, PS Krøyer’s painting shows: Martha Møller Johansen, Viggo Johansen, Christian Krohg, PS Krøyer, Degn Brøndum, Michael Ancher, Oscar Björck, Thorvald Niss, Helene Christensen, Anna Ancher, Helga Ancher. While this may appear a spontaneous record of an actual event, in fact it was over four years in the painting.
Although popularly known as Danish Impressionists, most of the early work of the Skagen Painters was realist, including many genre scenes of fishing and the fishing community. For this weekend visit to Skagen, I’ll concentrate on three of the best of the group who showed most visible influence from Impressionism, and whose work remains accessible. You’ll find others represented in the many excellent art museums across Denmark, particularly that in Skagen.
Anna Kirstine Ancher (née Brøndum)
Anna Ancher was born and brought up in Skagen, the daughter of the owner of Brøndum’s guesthouse, and attended the private Vilhelm Kyhn College of Painting for women in Copenhagen from 1875. She married Michael Ancher in 1880, having one daughter, Helga, and they bought their house at Skagen in 1884.
She completed several paintings with her husband Michael, and they visited Paris together for six months in 1888-9, where she studied with Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, alongside Marie Triepcke, who was to marry PS Krøyer.
Her skills as a colourist and impressionist shine through in her solo works, as she progressed from realism after 1890 and became increasingly painterly in her brushstrokes. She was also influenced by Degas’ use of unusual angles and cropping, possibly reflecting some of the contemporary trends in photography.
Her subjects, like those of Berthe Morisot, were generally the intimacies of everyday family life, and she painted many women engaged in their everyday work such as sewing and knitting, supporting the fishermen whose lives were depicted by others in the group.
She painted Two Little Girls Being Taught How to Sew in 1910. The girls’ mother/teacher stands sewing in the rich light from a window to the right. Cast shadows on the plain pale lemon wall behind are complex: the sun is low in the sky, and those shadows fall from a large houseplant at the right, and external branches too.
She died in 1935.
Michael Peter Ancher
Michael Ancher was born on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic, and started training at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen in 1871, but left in 1875 without completing his studies. He settled in Skagen after that, and married Anna Brøndum in 1880. Despite her influence, he remained a realist throughout his career.
Michael Ancher’s Drowned Fisherman (1896) is one of many paintings he made of fishermen during his career, but his last major figurative work of them. It was inspired by the stories of two drowned fishermen, one of whom was famous for his heroism. Ancher skilfully arranges the men and women who would have surrounded a body so that the viewer becomes part of that circle.
The figures, and body, are lit from a small window at the right, which enhances the tragic atmosphere. The body lies across the width of the painting, still clad in wet oilskins. Together with the clothing of the grieving wife and daughter, those are the only bright colour.
His family portrait on Christmas Day 1900, completed in 1902, looks funereal. A family bible is open on the table as they gaze grimly away from the magnificent triptych of waves behind them. I believe that the woman at the far right is Anna Ancher, then aged 40; she wears a distinctive necklace with an anchor, the Danish for which is anker.
Christian Krohg
In 1879, on the encouragement of the artist Frits Thaulow, the Norwegian master Christian Krohg (1852–1925) travelled to Skagen, where he started his first major project, to document the lives of the Gaihede family of Skagen over the next decade.
His early painting of Ane Gaihede as a Woman Cutting Bread (1879) marks the start of Krohg’s social realism. He documents her in almost ethnographic detachment. She is aligned in profile, against an almost bare wall, perfectly framed at three-quarter length.
In Niels Gaihede Netting (c 1880), he shows the Gaihedes together, with Niels hard at work on his fishing net, and Ane in the background, staring quite sternly. Their surroundings are less spartan, but still frugal: the furniture is basic wood, and has seen better days, probably many decades ago. A clock and some sheets of prints taken from a magazine are the only objects on the blank white wall behind. Niels wears large wooden working clogs, and his trousers have been patched many times.
Krohg returned to Skagen for the summer of 1888 when he resumed his almost clinical studies of the Gaihede family with this portrait of Ane Gaihede (1888).
As her husband rests in Niels Gaihede’s Afternoon Nap (1888), Ane sits knitting in the shadows to the right.
References
Art Museums of Skagen
Wikipedia
Berman PG (2007) In Another Light. Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 23844 8.
The Eclectic Light Company 