{"id":3823,"date":"2026-01-10T18:35:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T17:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/?p=3823"},"modified":"2026-01-11T11:09:38","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T10:09:38","slug":"a-quiet-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2026\/01\/10\/a-quiet-light\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quiet Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

I read recently \u2013 I can\u2019t remember where \u2013 that people who say \u201cI don\u2019t know much about art, but I know what I like\u201d actually do know quite a bit about art. More than average at any rate. I think this may well be true. Although I would classify myself as someone who doesn\u2019t know much about art, I have been going to galleries since my parents dragged me as a child around the Louvre and the Uffizi, and I have for a long time now gone of my own accord to galleries, sometimes with reluctant children in tow, here in London and in most of the foreign cities I have been lucky enough to visit.<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t know very much about techniques, or schools, or movements, but I do know what I like \u2013\u00a0 realism, impressionism, some abstract stuff, Velasquez, Holbein, Turner, Caravaggio, D\u00fcrer, Jack B Yeats, for example \u2013 and what I\u2019m not so keen on, which includes a lot of surrealist works, medieval art, and some abstract stuff. I\u2019m confident enough to know that it\u2019s OK not to like works that others have pronounced to be masterpieces and to just spend time in galleries with the pieces that catch my attention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a tube station last November my attention was caught by a poster advertising an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery<\/a> of the works of Danish artist Anna Ancher called \u201cPainting Light\u201d. The poster showed a fragment one of her signature works (Sunlight in the Blue Room<\/em>) which depicts a blond girl in a blue dress facing away from the viewer, her hair shining in the sunlight that streams in from the window to her right and a casts a bright trapezium on the blue wall in front of her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t put into words what exactly I found so captivating about that image and sent me to Dulwich a couple of week later, but I think it was mainly the light<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I had never heard of Ancher before. She is well known in her native Denmark but this is her first exhibition in the UK. Born in the late 19th Century Ancher lived and worked in Skagen, a small fishing town at the northernmost tip of Denmark. Many of her paintings, or at least the selection on display in Dulwich, depict domestic scenes in her own home and in the homes of some of her poorer neighbours.<\/p>\n

\"Ancher's<\/a>

Interior with poppies and reading woman<\/p><\/div>\n

The exhibition is of a modest size, just four rooms containing, if memory serves, about fifty paintings in all. That\u2019s a good size I found, since you have time to see everything and then go back to the ones that have made the deepest impression. Looking back at the eleven works that I took pictures of with my iPhone, all but two are of people in their houses, none of them looking at the viewer. Instead they all look down, either focused on the task at hand \u2013 washing, sewing, eating, reading \u2013 or lost in their own thoughts. I only noticed this afterwards but the lack of any direct engagement with the viewer makes you the unseen observer of quiet moments. In most of the pictures I photographed there is only a single figure, but even in those works that contain two or three people, they are together but not conversing with one another. Although the paintings are therefore imbued with a sense of solitariness, the light brings a warmth that keeps melancholy at bay.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

The Maid in the Kitchen<\/p><\/div>\n

In the days and weeks after I had been to the exhibition, I found that I kept returning to the photos I had taken. The luminous qualities of Ancher\u2019s paintings are both literal and metaphorical. It struck me that the ordinariness of many of the compositions is at times deceptive, as in The Maid in the Kitchen <\/i>shown above. The delicacy of the light surrounding and illuminating the figures in the paintings enhances the tranquility of these domestic scenes, conferring an etherial beauty that, at the risk of over-romanticising the work, surfaced for me the deep mysteriousness of our existence, something that we tend to forget amid our everyday cares.<\/p>\n

My favourite Ancher painting in the exhibition was At The Meal<\/i>. It\u2019s a small picture, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, that shows a middle-aged couple sitting at a little table. The wife, in a black headscarf, faces forward, her features illuminated by the weak light coming from the window on the right. Her hands are clasped, possibly to say grace, and her eyes are cast down, not looking at her husband, who faces away from the viewer and is mostly in shadow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ancher's<\/a>

Ancher – At the meal<\/p><\/div>\n

The light is a little colder than in most of the other works on show. But there is still a warmth in the muted brown tones of the scene of two people who have been together for a long time. They may not have much \u2013\u00a0the furnishings are sparse and there is only a small amount of food on the table \u2013 but they have each other. The word that sprang to mind when I first saw this painting was companionable<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I suspect At The Meal <\/i>resonated with me because my own life is now more muted, the noise and colour of a busy academic schedule having been replaced by the homely routine of caring for my wife, who is living with a physically debilitating neurological condition. I recognise the quiet light of the painting, the moments of unspoken togetherness, in my own day-to-day living. Our situation is hard, sad even at times. Horizons that once spread across the world are now largely contained within just a couple of rooms of our house. But there is still great contentment to be had, living quietly and companionably.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The consolation I found in Ancher\u2019s paintings reminded me of Vermeer\u2019s The Little Street<\/i><\/a>, which the philosopher Alain de Botton has suggested<\/a> to be emblematic of more ordinary measures of success than the unrealistic expectations that we too often foist unhappily and unhealthily upon ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Vermeer's<\/a>

Vermeer’s The Little Street<\/p><\/div>\n

The importance of quiet, everyday accomplishments is also central to George Eliot\u2019s novel Middlemarch<\/i>, which I was in the midst of reading when I went to the Ancher exhibition. Its closing lines, summarising the life of the main character, Dorothea, are all of a piece with the spirit of Ancher\u2019s work and provide a salutary reminder, at a time when all hope of goodness and justice seems to be disappearing from the world, that we still have the capacity to shine a quiet light on the lives of those around us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHer finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The exhibition Painting Light<\/a> is on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 08 March 2026<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read recently \u2013 I can\u2019t remember where \u2013 that people who say \u201cI don\u2019t know much about art, but I know what I like\u201d actually do know quite a bit about art. More than average at any rate. I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3823"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3826,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions\/3826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}