![[Painting] Two Fishermen from Skagen at the Window in the Grocery Store, 1915 | Michael Ancher](https://peculiar-florist.s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/files/852fb10f-cd5d-4438-8daf-dad7eec78bc2.jpg){kind=link}
[Painting] Two Fishermen from Skagen at the Window in the Grocery Store, 1915 | Michael Ancher
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Two fishermen in full working gear – oilskins and sou’westers – gaze out of a window. The incoming daylight illuminates their faces and upper bodies and sets them apart from the otherwise barely lit room.
The play of light on the smooth surface of their oilskin jackets is captured in rough brushstrokes, but their facial features are rendered in rich detail. Their faces frozen in concentration, the two men are staring intently at what is happening outside: everyday village life, the weather or homecoming fishermen?
The paintings by the Skagen artists’ colony around Michael Ancher captured contemplative scenes unrelated to work, and not only the high-adrenaline, laborious and dangerous activity of fishermen and sailors on the coast and the high seas.
Aside from domestic settings, the village pub belonging to Brøndums Hotel – referred to in the title as the “grocery shop” – was an important location for portraying village life.
Skagen artists showed a great fondness for painting interior scenes, which was partly due to the renewed popularity of genre painting from the Dutch Golden Age during the second half of the 19th century. Echoing the influential French art historian Théophile Thoré – who rediscovered the work of the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer – the Skagen painter and art historian Karl Madsen highlighted his outstanding importance for contemporary painting in 1884.
The Danish art historian Emil Hannover boldly undertook a direct comparison between works by Vermeer and Ancher in an exhibition review from 1887.
Although far simpler in structure, the painting “Two Fishermen from Skagen at the Window in the Grocery Store” also reveals parallels to Veneer’s compositional style. Like here, the figures in his paintings are often placed at the window, with daylight streaming in from the side to highlight the materiality of their clothing and the furnishings. KS