Marie Krøyer seated in the deckchair in the garden by Mrs Bendsen's house

A woman sits in a striped canvas deckchair, reading, tucked into the shade beside a whitewashed cottage. This is Marie Krøyer, wife of the painter, caught in an ordinary summer afternoon in the Danish fishing village of Skagen. The big rose bush bursting with white blooms takes up nearly half the picture, and the sunlight falling through the grass and leaves gives the whole garden a warm, dappled feeling. If you look near Marie's feet, you can spot a dog curled up asleep in the grass, easy to miss in the dark patch of shadow.

Peder Severin Krøyer was the best known of the Skagen Painters, a circle of Scandinavian artists who gathered in that remote northern town in the late 1800s to paint the light, the sea, and each other. Marie appears in many of his works, and here he clearly cared more about the play of sun and shade than about telling any particular story. The loose, quick brushwork on the flowers and grass shows a painter working in the open air, trying to catch a fleeting moment before the light shifted. It is a simple scene of a summer day, painted by a man watching someone he loved.