‘Painting Light’ – Anna Ancher

 

Battened down grey skies were the order of the day as I entered the Dulwich Picture Gallery, but on exiting, the sun speared through heavy clouds and tuned the light towards the kind of luminous blues that we’d just encountered in the paintings of Anna Ancher.

 

Sunlight in the Blue Room (1891)

To begin with the best. Sunlight in the Blue Room is on all the posters and, certainly initially, is the reason that I had ventured south of the river. Its vibrancy, warmth, and range of bold colours – not just the variety of blues – makes you hope and look forward to the summer. It also brilliantly serves the title of this exhibition. ‘Painting Light’ might parse as a rather conventional, even simple description of turn of the century paintings, but for me it comes across as literal: that is, not so much painting the way that light falls on objects, rather the painting of the light itself. Look at the way that the light spears through the window, falling on the wall and casting the shadow of the plant; how it sets ablaze the back of the head of Anna’s daughter Helga; and the prism of yellow, white, and blue that it forms on the carpet.

Detail from Sunlight in the Blue Room

Less spectacular, but just as evocative, is the light that falls on the pale blue walls of Interior: Brøndum’s Annex. I could not help but be struck by the subject and composition of this painting, and how close it was to many of the works of my favourite Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi. Less melancholy though, and lighter on the mood. Maybe Hammershøi is in danger of losing that number one spot, particularly as I get older and crave less sombre and mournful tones.  

Interior: Brøndum’s Annex (1916)

If a couple of these paintings recalled her fellow Dane, the artist that I was reminded of most strongly was the Frenchman Pierre Bonnard.  The choice of colours, the domesticity, the folded arms and barely delineated faces: all of this brought to mind Bonnard and the myriad depictions of his wife Martha at home. Look again at Sunlight in the Blue Room (it won’t be the last time that I ask you to do that) and compare it to Bonnard’s The French Window or Before Dinner. And lest you feel I’m going too far out on a tangent of male artists, Ancher is working contemporaneously with Bonnard and Hammershøi. Anyway, though I adore Bonnard, not even he is matching the glory of Sunlight in a Blue Room.

Pierre Bonnard, The French Window (1932)

There’s a variety to Ancher’s subjects and compositions, one that I wasn’t expecting after reading the reviews and accompanying images. Looking initially at The Old Window, you feel slighlty restless and all too eager to move quickly on to the next interior – or, as it were, to see what is behind the panes of glass in this painting. But after reading this wonderful essay on Carl Gustav Carus’s A View of the Sky from a Prison Window, I know better than to bolt.

The Old Window (1914)

Glass is as tricky to capture as light. But Ancher does it with aplomb. Vague, tiny lozenges of white, as if she’s cleaning the windows give a glorious depth to this image. Indeed, it’s a lesson in how reproductions can never quite capture the physicality of the subtlest dab of paint. This painting also reminds you just how many windows there are in this exhibition. I already wished that I had dwelled a little longer on the exquisitely calming Girl in the Kitchen. Look at this image and try not to think of Vermeer. Now that is no faint praise. 

The Girl in the Kitchen (1886)

So much in this exhibition is relaxing. But as you work your way through the four rooms, a note of ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ begins to sound. First an image of Ancher’s dead sister, and then, sparser, The Artist’s Dead Mother.

The Artist’s Dead Mother (1916)

Just enough light hits the face to conjure up that comforting euphemism ‘asleep’, leaving a delicate combination of repose and finality.   

Therefore, the very last room hits you like a punch. The painting on the very far wall plunges you – or, as the case may be, lifts you up - into the realms of rebirth. The artist’s mother (the resemblance to her actual mother is too alike to reach for the indefinite article on the curator’s label), so shortly seen on her deathbed is now kneeling by a graveyard cross, facing a bowed naked woman. It’s an eerie, Munchean image, and it feels like it belongs elsewhere.

Grief (1902) 

And it is that hint of ‘elsewhere’, the religious life perhaps, that got me thinking about one of the figures in the large painting adjacent to Grief, another composition that seemed so singular and out of place in this exhibition, A Field Sermon. 

A Field Sermon (1903)

This time the curator’s label is not ignored, and I fasten on to the hint. ‘Ancher’s own relationship with religion is unclear. She rarely wrote about her faith, and although she had been raised Christian, her own beliefs do not appear to have been strict.’  My eye skirts over the plein air congregation listening attentively to the preacher. But it’s the woman at the back of the group, alone, separated, who intrigues. Is this Ancher’s self-portrait, Velázquez-Las Meninas-style, of a woman unattaching herself from community and religion? Or even, less severely, trying to attain a level of ironic objectivity in order to see the whole better?

I return, as promised, to Sunlight in the Blue Room. In the very top left of the painting is a Madonna. So rarely does the mother of Christ escape the light in painting, but here she is untouched, almost forgotten and pushed deep into the corner. 

Detail from Sunlight in the Blue Room

I don’t know enough about Ancher and her beliefs, but it seems to me, that at the very least, there’s a glorious celebration of the earthly in her work. A doubt which is complemented by and fastens onto what Louis MacNeice described as the ‘incorrigibly plural’. To focus on and depict objects such as a dead fish, open doorways and thresholds, a pillow sunk in the middle from the weight of a mother’s head, and the way that sunlight cascades through a window and falls across a girl, a table, and a carpet.