Image: Anna Ancher, Plucking the Christmas Geese (1904).

For our last post of the year, and our last “Saturday in the Museum” post we choose something apropos of the season and our theme of food. Also in keeping with a sub-theme of the series, we discover an artist.

In this case the artist is Anna Ancher. She was born in Skagen, Denmark in 1859. Denied access to Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts because of her gender, she sought out other teachers to develop her artistic talent. Skagen was home to an artist colony that centered on the inn her family ran in Skagen. She was the only member of the artist colony actually to be born there. She would eventually marry an artist, and her daughter would become an artist as well.

In 2013, the National Museum of Women in the Arts did a show of her work, A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony. In a gallery talk for that exhibit, Skagens Museum curator Mette Bøgh Jensen said, “If you ask Danes to name a woman artist, they will say Anna Ancher.” Jensen said her paintings are “more about the color and light than anything else.” She also tended toward interior paintings.

All of that comes through in the piece we post this week, Julegæssene plukkes or Plucking the Christmas Geese (there is confusion on whether it is plural, but there are three geese in the painting!). The work is in the holdings of the National Gallery of Denmark, which held a large exhibition of her work two years ago.

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We wish everyone the best for the remainder of the holiday season. For those few, those happy few, that kept clicking through and reading these Saturday art posts, we thank you. It was a good three-year run. We did a year on the classic intersection of art and food – the still life. We did a year where the subject was feasts and meals and the communal nature of food. This year requiring even a little more digging for paintings that focused on where food comes from. We may still occasionally post about art, but this marks the last of the Saturday in the Museum series. Life pulls in other directions, and we need to maintain focus on primary purpose of this site, a dining guide for D.C. We truly enjoyed doing these posts as we went down rabbit holes early in the morning over the first, then second cup of coffee. Thanks again for reading.

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Stay warm, be kind, tip big. Look for new dining posts early next month!