Right at the northern tip of Denmark, where two seas meet under endless skies: Skagen, a fishing village that developed into a late 19th-century artists' colony. One of those artists was actually from Skagen; her parents ran Brøndum's Hotel in the village. Anna Brøndum went on to become Denmark's most famous woman painter: Anna Ancher. You won't find any paintings by her in any public collection in Britain (we know, we've used that line before when writing about several other artists), and, rather oddly, she doesn't even get a mention in Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men . The illumination you need is provided at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London, in Anna Ancher: Painting Light . She had a way with light, coming in through windows and casting shadows on walls, reflecting on the sea, breaking through the trees in her garden. These are generally very intimate, understated pictures, yet sometimes quite breathtaking. Virtually all th...
Which exhibition are we most looking forward to this month? It has to be Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, which starts on September 30. It's the first major retrospective of the great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age in three decades, and it will assemble around 50 of his works, including a couple of his large-scale group portraits of militiamen from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A must-see, particularly if you missed the fantastic show focusing on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection a couple of years back. All that swaggering loose -- or even louche -- brushwork is on display at the National Gallery until January 21, before transferring to the Rijksmuseum in February and then the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July. Hals was originally from Antwerp, and it was in the Flemish port city that his close contemporary Peter Paul Rubens spent much of his life and career. The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery i...