Oil on canvas; 110 x 88 cm.
Michael Peter Ancher was a Danish impressionist artist. He is most associated with his paintings of fishermen and other scenes from the Danish port of Skagen. His paintings are classics and he is probably one of Denmark's most popular artists.
He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen (1871-5), where his teachers Wilhelm Marstrand and Frederik Vermehren encouraged his interest in genre painting. Here he also met Karl Madsen, who would later become Skagen Museum's first director and who invited him to travel to Skagen. A group of artists had congregated to form the Skagen Painters in Skagen, a small fishing village in the north of Denmark.
After Ancher first visited Skagen in 1874, he settled there joining the growing society of artists. In 1880 Ancher married fellow painter and Skagen native Anna Brøndum, whose father owned the Brøndums Hotel. In the first years of their marriage, the couple had a home and studio in the "Garden House", which is now in Skagen Museum garden. After the birth of his daughter Helga in 1883 the family moved to Markve in Skagen.
He got his artistic breakthrough in 1879 with the painting Will he Round the Point?. Michael Ancher's works are true-to-life depictions of reality and at the same time monumental figure compositions. Michael Ancher's life's work is founded on the heroic series The Lifeboat is Carried Through The Dunes (1883), The Crew Are Saved (1894) and The Drowned Man (1896).
Michael Ancher was influenced by his traditional training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1870s which imposed strict rules for composition, and he found it difficult to adjust to Scandinavian painting's modern breakthrough, the "Skagen School". His marriage to Anna Ancher did, however, introduce him to the naturalistic concept of undecorated reproduction of reality and its colours. By combining the pictorial composition of his youth with the teachings of naturalism, Michael Ancher created what has been called modern monumental figurative art such as A Baptism.
Anna and Michael Ancher are currently featured on the front side of the DKK1000 bill. The current version of this bill came into circulation on 25 November 2004. The front of the banknote has a double portrait of Anna and Michael Ancher, derived from two 1884 paintings by Peder Severin Krøyer.
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