Engel Saxild and Henry Madsen playing chess in Ancher's House.

Engel Saxild and Henry Madsen Playing Chess in Ancher's House, painted around 1900, documents the social interior of the Anchers' home at Skagen — a gathering place for the artistic colony and its associated visitors. Chess in an artist's home was a subject that went back to seventeenth-century genre painting and had been revived in the late nineteenth century as a way of depicting intellectual masculine sociability. Ancher's interior subjects are rarer than his outdoor work but show equal skill in managing the complex light of domestic spaces, and the naming of both chess players gives the work its particular biographical specificity.

Ancher stages the chess scene with attention to the distinctive quality of interior light falling on a table-top activity, the concentration of the players directing their figures downward toward the board. His handling of the room's domestic furnishing provides period specificity without distracting from the human subject.