Sunlight in the Blue Room

In the far north of Denmark, at Skagen, a colony of painters gathered in the late 1800s to chase the peculiar northern light, and Anna Ancher was the one of them who had actually grown up there. In 1891 she painted this small, still interior. Her young daughter Helga sits crocheting in a blue-walled room at the family hotel, the room where the girl's grandmother often sat. Almost nothing happens. The real subject is the sunlight coming through the window and landing on the blue wall to the left of the child, where it seems to gather and glow as a patch of pale warmth against the cool colour. Ancher strips the scene down to a few simple shapes and a narrow range of blues, and that plainness is exactly what set her apart. Working at the edge of Europe, she was pushing toward a bare, light-filled way of painting that many better-known artists of her generation had not reached.