Harvesters

In Anna Ancher’s harvest pictures, the harvesters are present in a very concrete sense, and it is always the man who carries the scythe, which is not only to be seen as symbolising the Grim Reaper, but also as a quite traditional division of the harvest work. The women’s work was usually linked to specific tools, and thus also distributed in the same way. In several of her oil sketches and finished paintings, Anna Ancher has worked with the composition, which is stringently built up around a perspective following the surface of the painting. The paintings are divided into two almost equal halves, which are only interrupted by the movement of the harvesters either in or counter to the reading direction from left to right. The composition in the harvest pictures acquires an almost frieze-like quality, and the division into two almost equally large areas of corn and sky respectively is a special quality in Anna Ancher’s harvest pictures, while she has also worked intensely with the light and shade effects and the blue and yellow complementary contrasts. In one harvest painting she has portrayed harvesters seen with the light behind them, while the sun in the other falls in from the left foreground and thus strikes the cornfield and the figures.