The Van Gogh yellow walls of Dulwich's exhibition space create an immediate sunshine glow which seems at odds with the first few paintings in their Anna Ancher retrospective. She is an unfamiliar name, and her association with the Skagen artists - the Newlyn of Denmark - only leads you up the garden path. The walls are really saying, prepare to be surprised. And you will be. A first small, slightly tentative self portrait, gaze obliquely avoiding ours, head on a questioning tilt, is equally misleading. This is, afterall, a woman happy not to gloss over her broken nose. The earthy sludge palette, reiterated in the portrait of Lars Gaihede Whittling a Stick, seems straight out of the realist playbook. But unlike most of her fellow artists, for Ancher this characterful old man is not merely local colour, a salt of the earth type generalisation: she had grown up knowing him and the other villagers she painted.
Ancher's life story is also open to misinterpretation. An ambitious mother, who saw talent written in the stars when Hans Christian Andersen visited Skagen on the night of Anna's birth. A fortuitous upbringing in the family hotel frequented by the 'colonising' painters and writers. Marriage to one of them, Michael Ancher, who encouraged and supported, and alongside whom she would travel to the artistic hot spots of Europe. This typically dismissive woman artist narrative downplays the clear, personal drive which unfolds through the exhibition in a series of innovative works. Husband frequently painted wife, but she rarely recorded him on canvas - the example here shows him as a country gent, about to go hunting after a good breakfast, rather than a fellow practitioner. Ancher has an unmistakeably independent streak.
The exhibition begins quietly, but this was a woman in a hurry to learn her craft. Maid in a Kitchen is repurposed Dutch genre, plain interior, soft lighting and subdued colours whose earthiness is now warmed by the central red streak of the woman's dress and the buttery light coming through the curtain. Elsewhere she has a German Renaissance eye for detail - the piles of coins on Stine Bollerhus' table, rabbits in a cottage - and an occasional drift into caricature. It is Sunlight in the Blue Room where we see Ancher really arrive: strong, complementary colour - blue walls and orange curtains - bold patterns and light streaming in, slicing objects, slapping the child's back; eating her hair, as one contemporary critic put it. Light has gone from a source of illumination to a tangible, tactile thing. The title says it all - the painting shows Ancher's daughter but she is not the subject.
Once light appears it is everywhere. The late, unframed Evening Sun in the Artist's Studio dissolves solid objects - the corner of the room is barely defined, the walls seem to bulge - and solidifies the sun. The grid pattern of light on the wall is painted with thick, impasto dashes of pinks and oranges that soak into the blue background tingeing it with warmth and seep across the floor like a pool of liquid. Skagen was famous for its clear light: Harvesters wade through golden corn under a blue sky, both bleached and cooled by it. For Ancher, however, it is less about the objective clarity it could offer, more about the aesthetic impact. Her landscapes have an Expressionist disregard for observed reality, instead offering up pinks and mauves and oranges so that Skagen becomes a place of Hansel and Gretel houses. There is more than a dash of Edvard Munch, in both these and in her repeated depiction of aging and death, but there is none of the Norwegian's angst and edge. a view of Daphnesvej, a street dedicated to local fisherman who gave their lives to help a shipwreck is an empty but not eerie place.
Along with light there is so much life. Friendship and family, gardens and comfortable interiors, plants and flowers. You occasionally wonder about the other side of this: a painting of Ancher's sisters, the ones who carried on running in the hotel, shows them glum and exhausted, leaving you to wonder what they thought of the favoured daughter's success and escape. Then there are the oddities: the enigmatic symbolism of Grief, supposedly inspired by a dream - artistic experiment or personal exploration? And Field Sermon, one of her few big set pieces, with its chilly hillside, disconnected crowd, and weedy preacher whose voice you imagine getting lost on the wind. Is it Ancher's jaundiced view of a religion she abandoned after her childhood, or some kind of artistic riposte to the Skagen style. In either case it is one of the less convincing works on show.
In the end it is the private experiments which have the most impact, including works discovered in a drawer as late as 2014. Anna Ancher was a one off, plotting a course towards reduction and abstraction, driven by a desire to pin down the ephemeral and the allusive, not just to capture a moment, but to solidify and preserve light itself. Dulwich have made a habit of showcasing women and other lesser known artists (their next show is dedicated to Estonian Konrad Magi). Thanks to them Ancher may now gain the kind of recognition in the UK that she deserves and which she currently enjoys in her homeland.
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