The beach at Højen

Weathered timbers jut out of the sand like the ribcage of something long dead, which is more or less what they are: the remains of a wrecked boat, picked over and left to bleach. Krøyer painted this on the spot and dated it in the lower left corner, "Højen 21 Aug 82," alongside his monogram. The sky takes up more than half the picture, a bank of grey-blue cloud rolling in over water that has gone flat and metallic. A thin pole leans in the shallows near a second heap of wreckage, and the low sun catches the foam of small breakers rolling onto an otherwise empty shore.

Højen is the old name for the settlement on the western side of Skagen, at the northern tip of Denmark, where two seas collide and ships came to grief with grim regularity. Wreck timber was so common there that villagers built with it. The summer of 1882 was Krøyer's first at Skagen, and he would return for decades, becoming the best known of the artists who gathered there to paint fishermen, beach parties and long blue evenings. This is not one of his showpieces. It is a small, fast oil study, the sand laid down in a few broad sweeps, made by a painter working out how this particular light behaved before the weather turned.