In the small village of Skagen, with its vivid yellow and red-brown houses, I was looking at paintings by Anna Ancher, one of the prominent artists of the Skagen Painters. The city with its vast sandy beaches and grasslands between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea is known for the many artists who have gathered there since the late 19th century and produced a variety of works.
Many of her works depict the fishing community of Skagen from the inside. An old woman silently engrossed in fabric work in the sunlight streaming in through a window, or a muscular man standing with a bird he has hunted in his hand, give us a glimpse of the daily activities of people that certainly exist in the midst of the silence, and the powerful relationships between people with a focus on living. At the same time, anthropology has, for a long period, depicted people's way of life as ethnography. It quietly ponders what is different (and at the same time what is common) between the discipline with her astonishing paintings.
