Portrait of a fisherman.

Portrait of a Fisherman, painted in 1904, is one of the late Skagen fishermen portraits in which Ancher continues his lifelong investigation of the Skagen community's character through individual faces. The fisherman portrait was the defining genre of his career — he had begun painting them in the 1870s and continued without interruption into the twentieth century, accumulating a body of work that transformed a single community into a sustained subject of artistic investigation. These late portraits have the confidence and economy of a painter who knows his subject completely.

The simplified compositional approach of Ancher's late fisherman portraits — bust or three-quarter length figure, limited background, concentrated attention on the face — allows the character of individual sitters to emerge without interference from elaborate setting or lighting. His handling of weathered skin and fishermen's clothing shows no diminution of observational precision.