Harvesters (Ancher)

Ancher is regarded as one of Denmark's greatest pictorial artists;[1] many of her works concentrate on the play of light in domestic scenes, but she is also known for religious themes and her studies of her ageing mother.

It is unusual in the canon of the Skagen Painters whose works mainly focused on the lives of the local fishing community or depicted interior or domestic scenes.

The fields of ripe crops link naturally to a theme of fertility and in contrast the man carrying the scythe at the front of the group conjures up images of death, personified as the Grim Reaper; Ancher is juxtaposing life and death, but she is also depicting the order and division of labour of the harvest: traditionally the man would scythe down the crop and the women would gather up the straw with just their hands or with a rake or pitchfork.

[3] The relatively small work (56.2 x 43.4 cm) is based on an earlier, larger painting by Ancher I høstens tid (Harvest Time, 1901) which was acquired by Storstrøms Kunstmuseum.

For her depiction of the man with the scythe in I høstens tid, Ancher used the local official and farmer "Rytter" Søren Christian Nielsen (1845–1925) as a model.