Måneskin ved Skagen Strand

The canvas is inscribed SK 18. Juni 99 — Skagen, 18 June 1899 — the fishing village at the northern tip of Jutland where Peder Severin Krøyer spent his summers from 1882 and where, with Michael and Anna Ancher, he became a leading figure of the group known as the Skagen Painters. Born in Stavanger in 1851 and raised in Copenhagen, he had entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at the age of twelve, travelled widely in Europe on scholarships in the late 1870s and studied in Paris under Léon Bonnat; he married the painter Marie Triepcke in 1889, and it was the beach and the artists’ colony at Skagen that supplied the subjects for which he is best loved, even as his eyesight failed him over the last decade of his life and he died there in 1909. This picture entered the museum in 2002, acquired from the conductor Georg Høeberg and his descendants, who had bought it from the artist together with its companion piece; the museum has shown it in Krøyer. I internationalt lys in 2011–12. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).