Woman with sheep.

Woman with Sheep, painted in 1902, belongs to the pastoral dimension of Ancher's Skagen subjects that included not only fishermen but the small-scale farming that supplemented the community's economy. The woman tending sheep is a subject with deep roots in European pastoral iconography, from the shepherdesses of Arcadian painting to the more realistic peasant women of Barbizon and Naturalist art. Ancher's treatment is characteristically direct — this is a specific woman doing specific work, not a symbolic figure in an idealized landscape. The sheep are treated as real animals rather than pastoral props.

Ancher handles the outdoor pastoral scene with the open-air light and broader brushwork of his exterior subjects, the woman and flock integrated into the landscape rather than placed against it. His rendering of the sheep's woolly coats — the specific texture of the animals — shows the same material attention he brings to the rough cloth of fishermen's garments.