Self-portrait with Anna Ancher.

Self-Portrait with Anna Ancher, painted in 1901, is one of the most intimate of Michael Ancher's self-portraits — showing both himself and his wife in a single image that presents their partnership with unusual directness. The dual self-portrait had precedents in European art from Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait onward, but Ancher's version is unpretentious and intimate rather than ceremonial. Two artists sharing a life and a community appears here as a simple fact — two faces in the same pictorial space — rather than a statement of artistic or social ambition.

The challenge of composing two portrait subjects of equal importance within a single image leads Ancher to a spatial arrangement that acknowledges both figures without subordinating either to the other. His self-observation, necessarily done with a mirror, shows the same directness he applies to all his portrait subjects — including, here, himself in relation to the woman beside him.