Stine Bollerhus counts the money earned selling bread.

Painted in 1879, this early canvas shows Stine Bollerhus — a local Skagen woman well known to the community of artists there — counting the money earned selling bread. Anna Ancher was just twenty years old when she completed this work, having grown up in Skagen as the daughter of the innkeeper Erik Brøndum, whose establishment served as the social hub of the Skagen Painters' colony. Ancher knew the local fishing community with an intimacy none of the visiting artists could match, and her paintings of named, specific individuals — rather than anonymous types — reflect this insider knowledge. Stine Bollerhus appears here not as a picturesque subject but as a fully realized person engaged in the practical business of her daily life. The subject of money-counting is unusual in genre painting; it gives the woman both economic agency and a moment of private concentration that Ancher renders without sentimentality. The work demonstrates the assurance and compositional confidence that would characterize Ancher's entire career, remarkable given her age at the time of execution. Held by the Skagens Museum, which preserves the most comprehensive collection of Skagen Painters' work, this canvas documents Ancher's early mastery of the close figure study in interior light.

Oil on canvas with direct, confident characterization of the figure. The light source — likely a small window — is handled with already sophisticated understanding of its modeling role, throwing the woman's face and hands into sharp relief against a darker interior background.