Mrs. Brøndum wearing white.

Mrs. Brøndum Wearing White (1903) depicts a member of the Brøndum family—the most prominent family in Skagen, into which Anna Ancher herself was born, and the family that ran the general store and inn that served as the social hub of the Skagen artists' colony. Painting a family member in white dress was an unusual choice for Ancher, whose palette typically favoured the warmer, more saturated tones of domestic interiors. White presented a specific technical challenge—rendering a figure in full white against any background required careful management of the tonal relationships that would make the white legible as white rather than simply as the composition's lightest area.

A figure dressed entirely in white requires Ancher to model form through the subtlest variations in tone and colour within near-white, using the shadows on the dress and the reflections of surrounding colours to give the figure three-dimensional presence. The challenge of painting white-on-white is ancient in European painting, and Ancher would have brought her full technical intelligence to bear on maintaining the dress's white character while making it visually coherent.