Albert Anker

Rosa and Bertha Gugger were the daughters of the Gugger-Küffer family from Ins. They were repeatedly used as models by Albert Anker. The younger Rosa was born in 1881, she was four years old at the time of the painting and is being instructed by her older sister Bertha. Anker is using his tried and tested compositional technique of placing his models against a dark background and illuminating them from the front using a lamp. This enabled him to model the faces particularly delicately against the dimly-lit background and to precisely bring out the emotion of their expressions. The two upper bodies form a triangle, which is reinforced by the hands holding the needles and yarn. While the older sister’s right hand rests on the edge of the table, her left steers Rosa’s hands in a guiding gesture. Rosa’s childlike hands, in contrast, hold the thin knitting needles somewhat anxiously. The path to dexterity is long and for the artist was an indication of the level of a child’s development. In 1898, Anker published an article in the magazine La Suisse libérale, in which he addressed the developmental stages of children. He uses the scolarly text to highlight the central role of the hands: it is in using them that children are able to discover themselves and their own personality. There was hardly any other painter of the era that paid as much attention to hands as Anker.