Albert Anker

For his pen and ink drawings, Albert Anker used broad barrel reed, flexible quill, and rigid metal nib pens. His dip pens and inkstand were readily at hand whenever he wanted to capture his children and his wife reading in the evenings during the 1880s and 1890s, or when he was doing sketches for commissioned work. The artist worked as closely as possible to nature, that is, to the living model and the real object, frequently repeating certain studies using a different technique or developing them into paintings. For many years, Anker made sketches especially during the summer in Ins, and then worked the sketches into paintings during the winter in Paris. The three sketches depict an elegantly dressed young woman reading in upper middle-class surroundings, either seated at the window or bending over a book at a table. In all likelihood it is Marie Anker, who would have been 25 or 26 years old at the time the drawings were created (1897/98) and had married the music professor Albert Quinche in Neuchâtel in 1892. The elegant interior is one appropriate to a professor’s wife. There are two reasons for suspecting that they are indeed portraits of Marie: firstly, this particular sketchbook was among the possessions of Charlotte Quinche, Marie Anker’s daughter, and secondly, the cover of the self-stitched sketchbook bears the dedication: “ALBUM de PAPIER-AMOUR collectionné pour MARIE.”