Loss, the Female Nude, and Anna Ancher’s Sorg: A Woman’s Own Modernism

Sorg by Anna Brøndum Ancher (1859–1935) is atypical within the artist’s own repertoire. Additionally, it counterbalanced Copenhagen’s avant-garde at the turn of the century. Like internationally renowned artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, recognized Danish male Symbolists, such as Joakim Skovgaard, depicted women and their nude bodies as highly sexualized and symbolic of temptation and fertility. In Ancher’s 1902 painting (fig. 1, p. 103), in contrast, a young, penitent female nude kneels in front of a traditional Danish funerary cross within a bleak Christian graveyard. She confronts, petitions, or perhaps confesses to an older woman, clothed in black.¹ Ancher set the figures before a brilliant, atmospheric evening sky marked by striations of brilliant oranges and pinks across violets, grays, and blues. Most importantly, Ancher’s compelling yet enigmatic representation of a female nude provokes reflection, as this female artist visually intimates pregnancy, associates maternal themes with death, and sensitively depicts the belief of pious rural women in Denmark at the turn of the century. Sorg’s themes paralleled those of Danish Symbolists; however, Ancher’s distinctive artistic choices are informed by her experience of modernity as a thoughtful Nordic woman artist.

Ancher’s father, followed by her brother, owned and operated a hotel in the remote coastal town of Skagen, at the northern tip of Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula where the Baltic meets the North Sea. Her mother and unmarried sisters shared in many of the operations of the family business. Ancher and her husband, the painter Michael Ancher, were among the core members of an art colony that formed in Skagen late in the 1870s. Despite Ancher’s provincial background, by the turn of the century, she had also traveled to Paris and other European cities, and had spent a fair amount of time each year in the Danish capital. Ancher was both an artist in her own right and, as a young woman, had been a model for the mostly male art colonists. For example, her husband portrayed her pregnant figure in Portræt af min hustru: Malerinden Anna Ancher (1884; Portrait of My Wife: The Painter Anna Ancher), and her colleague P. S. Krøyer positioned her as the focal point of his Hip! Hip! Hurra! (1888). Ancher had only one child, her daughter, Helga, born in 1883.

As an exhibitor in Denmark and Europe, Ancher enjoyed considerable success. Her professional circle included Mette Gad Gauguin; avant-garde artists and architects such as Vilhelm Hammershøi and Thorvald Bindesbøll; and activists for women in the arts, including Marie Triepcke Krøyer and Susette Holten født Skovgaard.² Because verbal documentary evidence is inadequate, scholars must rely on her canvases to interrogate how her professional practice related to these associates who helped to transform Danish culture at the turn of the century. Ancher’s published correspondence provides only a fragmentary glimpse into her thoughts.³ Furthermore, her husband’s detailed notebooks, which are the basis for most Skagen histories, might have distorted his wife’s views or intentions in art, simply by virtue of not being her own (Jensen 2005, 11–36).

Historians do not elaborate on Ancher’s “dream” that was the basis for Sorg (Grief), a painting that has received limited critical attention. According to the Skagen scholar Lise Svanholm (2005, 134), there were no associated deaths in the family to account for the subject. Journalist Henriette Bjarne Hansen summarizes the general critical consensus about this painting in an article in Udfordringen: Ancher’s dream echoed the painter’s personal dilemma, “splittelsen mellem hendes tro på Gud og det frie bohemeliv blandt kunstnerne i Skagen” (Hansen 2010) [split between her faith in God and the free bohemian lifestyle of the artists in Skagen]. Ancher’s mother and sisters were devout pietist women. According to family recollections, the artist’s mother chastised herself for family misfortunes and bargained with God for mercy and forgiveness by pledging a lifetime of charitable mission (Svanholm 2001, 163). However, artist parties in Skagen’s heyday of the 1880s...