MURA · THE COLLECTION · MICHAEL ANCHER

Two Girls in a Summer Field

Two Girls in a Field. A Summer's Day (Danish: To piger på en mark. Sommerdag) is an oil painting by Michael Ancher, dated to about 1887. It measures 43 by 62.5 cm, is signed "M Ancher" at lower right, and has belonged to the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen since 1933 as inventory number KMS4043.

Michael Ancher · 1885-1889 · Oil on canvas · Danish painting · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The picture is catalogued as a landscape, and the SMK data mirrored on Wikimedia Commons describes it simply as two girls in a field on a summer day. Mura's catalogue entry adds that the two small figures rest together in a wide field beneath a pale northern sky. The sources consulted do not identify the girls or the field.

The subject is a departure from the work Ancher is best known for. Wikipedia describes him as widely known for his paintings of fishermen and the fishing community at Skagen, where he settled after a first visit in 1874, and where his breakthrough came with Will He Round the Point? Born on 9 June 1849 at Rutsker on Bornholm, he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1871 to 1875 without graduating. In 1880 he married Anna Brøndum, the Skagen-born painter whose father owned Brøndums Hotel; their daughter Helga was born in 1883.

How it was painted

The work is oil on canvas. The dating rests on the museum's own bracket of 1885-1889, refined on Wikidata and Commons to about 1887. This places it in the years just after Helga's birth and shortly before Ancher received the Eckersberg Medal in 1889. Beyond medium, size and signature, the sources fetched say nothing about how the picture was made.

Where it went

The SMK data on Commons records that the painting was acquired by the museum in 1933. It was shown in the Michael Ancher retrospective in Copenhagen in 1949 as number 19, and between 2004 and 2011 it travelled to exhibitions in Helsinki, Tromsø, Moscow, Punkaharju, Copenhagen and Mantua. It is reproduced on page 18 of Knut Ljøgodt's Fra gullalder til Cobra: dansk kunst i 150 år (2005). The inventory number is KMS4043. Whether the painting is currently on view at SMK is not stated in the sources consulted.

Why it is in Mura

The painting is part of Mura's Nordic Light collection with the mood pastoral: two children at rest in an open summer field.