Little Girl with Flower

Anna Ancher's 1885 pastel of a little girl holding a flower is an early work from the Skagen period, when Ancher was developing the luminous, sunlit domestic imagery that would become her signature. Ancher, born into the innkeeper's family at Brøndums Hotel in Skagen — the northernmost town of Denmark, which had become an artists' colony from the late 1870s — was uniquely positioned at the centre of Scandinavian Impressionism. Unlike most of her contemporaries who had to travel to Skagen, she was born there; unlike the male artists who documented fisherfolk and seascapes, she focused with sustained attention on the domestic interiors and daily life of the community, particularly its women and children. The 1885 date places this pastel in the early productive phase of her career, a year after her marriage to the painter Michael Ancher. The pastel medium, with its capacity for soft, powdery colour and rapid mark-making, was well-suited to intimate child subjects and to capturing the informal, spontaneous quality of a child's momentary pose.

Pastel allowed Ancher to work quickly in natural light, building colour through layered strokes of pigment that could be blended or left distinct depending on the quality she sought. The softness of pastel colour suits the delicate skin tones and flower colour of the subject, while the medium's limited blending range encourages a directness of mark-making appropriate to the candid, informal pose.