Anna Ancher at National Museum of Women in the Arts

This Winter, National Museum of Women in the Arts presents the first exhibition in the U.S. ever to focus on the female painter Anna Ancher, and the artist colony of Skagen, Denmark.

Picture: A Field Sermon (1903)

Source: Skagen Art Museum

The first exhibition in the United States to focus on the Danish painter Anna Ancher (1859–1935) and the artist colony at Skagen, Denmark, A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony will introduce American audiences to the exceptional art created in the late nineteenth century in this village in northern Denmark.

Through paintings rarely seen outside Denmark, the exhibition highlights the work of a woman whose singular vision enriched a community of artists. Anna Ancher’s meditative interior scenes and landscapes were singled out by critics of her time for their deft use of color, lively brushwork, and skilled depiction of Skagen’s crystalline light.

A World Apart reveals Skagen, Ancher’s remote seaside hometown, as a haven for artists from city life. Skagen was a locale in which Ancher and others moved beyond the neoclassical national painting style that flourished in the early nineteenth century toward a modern aesthetic.

Their works were shaped by the realist, impressionist, and symbolist movements that effloresced in turn of the century Europe. The exhibition features forty-one paintings and oil sketches by Ancher and twenty by artists in her circle.