“Primitive” Paintings by Naturalist Anna Ancher

May 30th, 2018

Awake Goy

Anna Ancher (1859 – 1935) is one of Denmark’s most celebrated pictorial artists, but she is relatively unknown internationally. She was born in the small fishing village of Skagen, where an artist colony came to form, though she was the only artist born there. Her style, which was not always highly detailed and polished like academic paintings, was inspired by her desire to “get back to nature”.

Anna and her husband, also a painter, had one daughter, and Anna went against “tradition” to continue painting, as she was expected to solely be a mother.

From “Who Was Anna Ancher?“:

Anna Ancher (1859 – 1935) was a Danish painter active in the late 19th and early 20th century. She was part of a group of artists and other creative people who briefly lived and worked in the small fisherfolk village of Skagen in Northern Denmark, known as the Skagen colony.

In the nineteenth century, colonies like this were pretty common. Between 1830 and 1910, over three thousand artists in Europe joined the different rural artists’ colonies that were established around the continent. This was a reaction against the increasing amount of industrialization in the cities. Artists who joined colonies often wanted to reconnect with a simpler way of life. As Skagen colonist and poet Holger Drachmann put it, “…I want to return to nature, to the naïve, the original, the uncomplicated, whatever you want to call it.”

Inspired by Naturalist and Realist philosophies, which valued objectivity and authenticity, the Skagen artists wanted to paint “the truth”, which generally meant “the ugly” or “the primitive”. They painted the local fisherfolk in ways that reinforced their primitiveness (because of their lower class and remote location) with rapid brushstrokes and plein-air (open air) painting.