Die Mutter der Künstlerin, Ane Hedvig Brøndum, im roten Zimmer

The old woman by the window is the painter's mother, and the room is inside a hotel in Skagen, the fishing town at the northern tip of Denmark. Ane Hedvig Brøndum ran that hotel, and its dining room was where the Skagen painters gathered each summer, so this quiet interior is really the household the whole artists' colony revolved around. Anna Ancher had grown up in these rooms and was the only one of the Skagen painters actually born in the town. Here in 1909 she paints her mother, by then in her eighties, in the warm red room that opens through a doorway to the cooler blue one beyond. That blue room was where the old woman liked to sit and read.