Sunshine in the room of the blind. Study

Anna Ancher's study 'Sunshine in the Room of the Blind' (1885) is a preparatory work for one of her most celebrated paintings — the full version documented a blind person in a sunlit Skagen interior, the cruel paradox of brilliant light experienced by someone who cannot see it. The study captures the initial working-out of this subject's extraordinary formal challenge: how to paint the quality of sunshine in a room for a subject who cannot respond to it, and how to make that impossibility visible to the viewer who can.

The study captures the essential formal problem of the subject: the brilliant sunshine entering the room, rendered with Ancher's characteristic sensitivity to the specific quality of Skagen interior light, in a space inhabited by someone for whom this light has a different meaning. Her handling of the sunlit atmosphere — the way light transforms the room's ordinary objects — is the study's primary technical concern, establishing the approach that the final painting would elaborate.