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P.S. Krøyer, 'Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach', 1893

 


Pale, uninterrupted colours seep, merge and flow together in Krøyer's Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach, painted just before the turn of the century, and depicting the well-known artists' colony in Denmark. It is a painting of peacefulness personified, a quiet, contemplative scene where two figures and the boundless idyllic natural world live together in harmony. Through Krøyer's sweeping brushwork, the artist successfully closes the gap between sea, land and sky, as layers of blue and white bleed together into an expansive natural beauty. 

Despite his merging of boundaries, Krøyer maintains an effortless three-dimensionality to his landscape, captured in the use of perspective: placing a viewer essentially on the same plane as the two strolling figures enables the coastline to stretch out before them and us, allowing a viewer to almost become involved in the painting. This additionally furthers the sense of nature's endlessness, as it disappears both behind us and in front of us. The gentle troughs in the sand in the foreground also suggest the footsteps of others, and the path laid out before an onlooker's feet to follow for themselves into the painting. As a viewer looks up, their eye follows the neat coastline sweeping around the right-hand side of the painting, the subtle green mountains just visible, and beyond that a headland, jutting outwards and disappearing into the murky blue sky. Krøyer has expertly crafted his colour palette so that no change in tone is discordant, almost with no breaks in brushwork to allow land and sea to combine before a viewer's eye.

However, there are two figures that seemingly distract from the view of Skagen beach, traversing that boundary between land and sea. Depicted almost like Classical sculptures, with their white dresses expressed by overtly linear brushstrokes, tucked together and deep in conversation, the viewer remains unable to reach them. The skirts of their dresses spill out behind them, as if to mimic the rippling water, as material merges with white sand. Skagen beach was a permanent move for Krøyer following his marriage in 1889 and the two figures he illustrates here are in fact fellow painters - on the left is Anna Ancher and on the right is Krøyer's wife, Marie Triepcke. The painting is also indicative of much Danish art throughout the nineteenth century, as a wave of nationalism swept through artistic practice and the subsequent creative output became more inward looking, drawing inspiration from the countryside and the landscapes which these artists had grown up around. This was also a style perpetuated by the Danish Royal Academy of Arts, which Krøyer himself passed through. It took four preparatory studies for Krøyer to capture, with Impressionistic ease, the gentle evening light, the mists rolling in, and the merging of liminal boundaries on Skagen beach, a subject that he would repeatedly return to throughout a very successful artistic career. 

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