Evening at Skagen

The sun has almost gone in this painting, sitting as a pale disc just above a flat, marshy plain at the very top of Denmark. Peder Severin Krøyer painted the land around Skagen, a fishing town on a sandy spit where the North Sea and the Baltic meet, and where the terrain is mostly heath, dune and shallow water. The pink flecks scattered across the bottom edge are blooming heather, and the stream winding through the middle catches what little light is left, turning silver and then gold as it curves toward the horizon. The clouds do most of the work here, streaked in apricot and grey with brushwork left loose and visible.

Krøyer was the best known of the Skagen Painters, a group of Scandinavian artists who started spending summers in the town in the 1870s because of its unusual light. He trained in Copenhagen and then in Paris under Léon Bonnat, picking up the French habit of painting outdoors, straight from the subject. Most people know him for his beach scenes with figures strolling at dusk, so a landscape with no people in it at all is a bit of a departure. His later years were hard: his eyesight failed and his mental health declined, and he died in Skagen in 1909, still painting the place he had spent decades looking at.