Aftenstemning fra Skagen

The museum keeps only the Danish title — Aftenstemning fra Skagen, “Evening Mood, Skagen” — and dates the little panel 1893. It measures 32.3 × 43.2 cm and is painted in oil on wood; the museum holds it in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture.

The gallery’s own account of Krøyer singles out the half-light as his particular speciality, sustained in a long series of pictures he made out of doors in Skagen’s bright summer evenings. He had been attached to the town since 1882, when it was already a meeting place for Danish and Scandinavian painters and writers, and the museum credits him with turning that summer gathering into the festive working community that soon made the place fashionable — a community he also commemorated in the large group portrait of his fellow artists painted between 1884 and 1888.

P.S. Krøyer (1851–1909) was born in Stavanger in Norway and brought up in Copenhagen, where he began at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a boy in the 1860s. After the Academy he went to Paris and studied under Léon Bonnat, and a journey to Spain in 1878 with the art historian Julius Lange and the painter Frans Schwartz left him a lasting student of Velázquez and of the Spaniards’ handling of light and dark. He settled into Skagen from the early 1880s, married the painter Marie Triepcke in 1889, and died there in 1909. The museum calls him one of the principal figures of the breakthrough of the 1880s in Danish art. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).