Sunlight in the Blue Room

Anna Ancher was the only member of the Skagen Painters circle actually born in Skagen (a fishing village on the northern tip of Denmark). She painted her six-year-old daughter Helga in the family sitting room, absorbed in crocheting, sitting in a wedge of afternoon sunlight that falls across the blue-painted wall. The light itself is the subject — painted with the same solidity as the child and the walls. It is one of the first Danish paintings to make light itself the compositional centre, a decade after Monet started doing the same in Giverny. Anna Ancher is the most reproduced female painter in Denmark. Now at Skagens Museum, Skagen @skagensmuseum