Harvesting Girl
This picture was dedicated to Michael Ancher and is estimated to have been painted in 1882 or 1883, about a year before Oscar Björck went to Paris. Despite this, it looks like the artist had kept an eye on trends in French plein air painting. The field’s many yellow and brown nuances are more textured and loosely painted and provide vibrancy in the picture. It was Anna Ancher in particular, who adopted the motif of the harvest and later painted a lot of pictures with harvesters. The many harvest pictures from Skagen are testament to the major transformation that the landscape has undergone from that era to the present day. Today, most of the fields have been replaced by dune plantations. Björck visited Skagen several times in the 1880s. Björck later became a renowned portrait painter and was professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art in Stockholm from 1898 to 1925.
