Interior with sunlit walls. An elderly woman at her needlework. Signed and dated A. Ancher 1924. Oil on canvas. 52 × 66 cm. Exhibited: Presumably Charlottenborg 1924 no. 13. Provenance: Acquired from Kleis Kunsthandel in the 1930s by the current owner's grandfather. “She was the first in Danish art truly to understand how to capture a ray of sunlight.” With these words, the art historian Karl Madsen paid tribute to Anna Ancher in 1929, on the occasion of her 70th birthday. The quotation seems almost written for this particular work, which in many ways encapsulates the very essence of Anna Ancher’s art. “...and the sunlight reflected upon the wall is also one of her key motifs - perhaps even her signature motif...” (Peter Nørgaard Larsen, “Anna Ancher. Ud af Skagen og ind i verden”, p. 19, in the exhibition catalogue “Anna Ancher”, The National Gallery of Denmark, The Art Museums of Skagen and Lillehammer Art Museum, 2020–2021). The painting depicts a simple peasant interior into which rays of sunlight enter from a window beyond the picture plane. The light first falls upon the green plant and its earthenware pot by the window before moving through the room: across the red rear wall, over the elderly woman’s face, her blue needlework and the warm yellow surface of the table, continuing across the cool blue tones of the floor and its deep shadows, until it is finally reflected upon the wall of the adjoining room in a vibrating interplay of golden and ochre hues. The result is a refined and complex interplay of light, colour and stillness. At the centre of this hushed interior sits the elderly woman, quietly immersed in her needlework, surrounded by her few tools - the scissors, the thread, and the small sewing basket. Lilian Munk Rösing has described this central motif in Anna Ancher’s art: (in Danish): “In a long series of paintings, reflections of sunlight are combined with the motif of the working needleworker, as we have seen in “Studie af sypigens hoved” (Study of the seamstress’s head) and “Solskin i den blå stue” (Sunlight in the blue room) [from 1890 and 1891 respectively, both in the collection of The Art Museums of Skagen]. There is something about the state of the working needleworker - the contemplative or, to use Michael Fried’s term, absorbed concentration upon her work - that connects her to the materiality of light. While the women in Anna Ancher’s paintings works to give form to unshaped matter (for instance yarn), the artist herself works to give form to the material substance of light.” (Lilian Munk Rösing, “Almue og Avantgarde”, p. 56, in “Anna Ancher”, 2020–2021).