Anna Ancher

Anna Ancher was the only major Skagen painter who actually came from Skagen, the remote fishing village at Denmark's northern tip where artists gathered for its extraordinary sea light. She was born there, in her family's inn, while the others arrived as visitors.

She married the painter Michael Ancher, and the couple became the heart of the colony, but Anna was the finer colourist of the two. Her subjects are quiet and domestic, a woman plucking a hen, an old blind man by a window, sunlight falling across a plain interior wall. Her Sunlight in the Blue Room, with a small girl at a table, is really a study of coloured light on near-emptiness.

Danish institutions were slow to let women train as painters, and she studied where she could, including in Paris. She kept working from the same village rooms for half a century, and the house she shared with Michael is now a museum.