Michael Ancher’s artistic achievements at Skagen and his enthusiastic celebration of this northernmost peninsula of Denmark, paved the way for the establishment of the most important artistic colony there in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and for many years Ancher remained its most celebrated artist. Skagen’s artistic community and the Copenhagen School became the two most important forces in Danish art at his time, developing in parallel with post-impressionist movements in France.



Ancher was a farmer's son from Rutsker in Bornholm. At a young age he was sent to Kalo in Djursland to train as a clerk to a manorial steward. However his artistic talents became increasingly apparent, and he enrolled in the Copenhagen Academy in 1871. The Skagen peninsula had been greatly eulogised by Hans Christian Anderson and Ancher first visited in 1874, at the prompting of Karl Madsen, a leading Danish painter and art critic, who was already working there. Immediately captivated by Skagen’s fishing community and natural environment, Ancher set up his studio in the garden of the local inn and in 1880 married the innkeeper's step-daughter, Anna Brondum. She herself was an extremely talented artist and together they became Skagen’s pivotal artists.



The Jutland peasants had been Ancher's first pictorial subjects, depicted in a heavy realist manner, using a restrained and sombre palette. At Skagen he transferred his interest in 'folk' subjects to the local fishermen, painting portraits and narrative scenes of them at work and at leisure. Ancher became increasingly fascinated by the marvellous Skagen light and by the long summer evenings, capturing this atmosphere beautifully through a loose painterly technique and lightness of touch and tone. This was in part influenced by the Impressionist paintings he had seen on a trip to Paris with Peder S. Kroyer in 1888-9, and partly by the work of Kroyer himself, who had arrived in Skagen in 1882, intrigued by its fame.



Many of the important and distinctive features of Skagen art can be seen in Ancher’s Aalestangeren: a celebration of the rural in the poise, reserve and dignity of the isolated fisherman which beautifully echoes the tranquility of the place; and a profound sense of the vital force of nature itself, particularly in the striking use of colour for the sky and sea which dominate the composition.