Skagen Painters
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Skagen Painters were a group of Scandinavian artists who gathered in the village of Skagen, the northernmost part of Denmark, from the late 1870s until the turn of the century. Skagen was a summer destination whose scenic nature, local milieu and social community attracted northern artists to paint en plein air, emulating the French Impressionists—though members of the Skagen colony were also influenced by Realist movements such as the Barbizon school. They broke away from the rather rigid traditions of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, espousing the latest trends that they had learned in Paris. Among the group were Anna and Michael Ancher, Peder Severin Krøyer, Holger Drachmann, Karl Madsen, Laurits Tuxen, Marie Krøyer, Carl Locher, Viggo Johansen and Thorvald Niss from Denmark, Oscar Björck and Johan Krouthén from Sweden, and Christian Krohg and Eilif Peterssen from Norway. The group gathered together regularly at the Brøndums Hotel.
Skagen, in the very north of Jutland, was the largest fishing community in Denmark, with more than half of its population so engaged. Among the locals, fishermen were by far the most common subject for the Skagen painters. Skagen's long beaches were exploited in the group's landscapes; P.S. Krøyer, one of the best-known of the Skagen painters, was inspired by the light of the evening "Blue hour", which made the water and sky seem to optically merge. This is captured in one of his most famous paintings, Summer Evening at Skagen Beach – The Artist and his Wife (1899). Although the painters had their own individual styles without any requirement to adhere to a common approach or manifest, one of their common interests was to paint scenes of their own social gatherings, playing cards, celebrating or simply eating together.
Michael Ancher drew attention to the attractions of the area when his Will He Round the Point? (1885) was purchased by King Christian IX. He married Anna Brøndum, the only member of the group from Skagen, who became a pioneering female artist at a time when women were not permitted to study at Denmark's Royal Academy. Today the Skagens Museum, founded in the dining room at Brøndum's Hotel in October 1908, hosts many of their works of art, some 1,800 pieces in total. Many of the paintings have been digitized under the Google Art Project and are accessible online. Related exhibitions continue to be held; in 2008, the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen presented "The Skagen Painters—In a New Light", and in 2013, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. presented "A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony".
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