The Sick Woman

The Sick Woman, painted around 1900 and held at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, places Ancher in a tradition of depicting illness and convalescence that runs through nineteenth-century European painting. Sickness in the fishing community of Skagen was a serious matter — the harsh climate, the physical dangers of the North Sea, and the limited medical resources of a remote coastal town made illness a constant threat. Ancher's treatment of this subject is neither morbid nor sentimental: the sick woman is a specific person observed with care, the gravity of her condition acknowledged without melodrama.

Ancher handles the scene's subdued light — characteristic of a sickroom where windows might be partially shuttered — with the same tonal sensitivity he brings to all interior subjects. The recumbent figure requires a different compositional approach from his standing portrait work, the horizontal axis of the bed creating a different kind of pictorial organization.