🎨 ‘Sunlight in the Blue Room’ by Anna Ancher. 1891

Summer painting representing a moment of internal harmony in the bath of a blue room that slowly fills with sunlight. The charm of summer blue is the key element in this painting. Holy Mary on a blue wall, in a traditional room with old chairs and a peasant-style rug, with a girl crocheting in the sunlight is in fact the most sacred rendering of the freedom of human reason locked inside the silence of nature and its condition.

In this painting, Anna and Michael Ancher’s daughter, Helga Ancher, sits crocheting. Helga is seated in the blue room at Brøndum’s Hotel, where her grandmother, Ane Brøndum often sat. As in many of Anna Ancher’s works, there is no real action, instead it is the play of light in the room and the contrast of the blue and yellow hues in the image that are the theme of the painting.

Anna Ancher’s subjects are often so absorbed by their tasks that they are not aware of the presence of the viewer. The painting was exhibited for the first time at the annual Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in 1892.

The Skagen Painters were a close-knit group of mainly Danish artists who gathered each summer from the late 1870s in the fishing village of Skagen in the far north of Jutland, painting the local fishermen and their own gatherings and celebrations. Anna Ancher née Brøndum, the daughter of the local innkeeper, was the only member of the group from Skagen itself. Inspired by the works of the artists who spent their summers at the inn, she decided to take up painting as a profession at a time when women were not admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1880, she married Michael Ancher, one of the most productive members of the group. Unlike the other painters who depicted the local fishermen and landscapes captured en plein air, Anna’s works were mainly interiors and portraits of friends and family.