妻の肖像

Michael Ancher painted his wife, Anna, in 1884, and the picture caused a small scandal when it was shown in Copenhagen that year. Anna Ancher was a gifted painter in her own right, part of the artists' colony at Skagen in Denmark's far north. Here she stands in a long black dress and feathered hat that deliberately recall the grand portraits of van Dyck two centuries earlier. But look at the family dog, its nose pushed close to her rounded stomach. Anna is visibly pregnant. A full-length standing portrait was thought a pose fit for royalty, and showing pregnancy so openly struck some viewers as immodest. The study for it was made the previous summer, and that August, weeks after it was drawn, Anna gave birth to the couple's only child, a daughter named Helga.