Funeral for a fisherman of Skagen.

Funeral for a Fisherman of Skagen, painted in 1902, confronts the other end of the fisherman's life — the communal ritual of mourning when death came, as it regularly did, from the sea or illness. The fishing community's funerals were civic events, the whole village gathering to mark the loss, and Ancher's treatment of this subject gives it the same documentary seriousness as his portraits of living fishermen. The funeral painting exists in a tradition that includes Courbet's Burial at Ornans and other realistic treatments of communal death, though Ancher's version is focused on observation rather than social critique.

Ancher handles the funeral gathering with attention to the visual structure of collective mourning — the assembled figures, the spatial relationship between the mourners and what they mourn — creating a composition that respects the gravity of the subject without dramatic exaggeration. His palette moves toward the darker, more muted tones appropriate to the event's solemnity.