MURA · THE COLLECTION · PEDER SEVERIN KRØYER

Boys Bathing at Skagen

Boys Bathing at Skagen. Summer Evening is an oil painting by P.S. Krøyer, made at Skagen in the summer of 1899. It measures 100.5 by 153 cm and is signed "S.Krøyer - 99 Skagen". The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen bought it from the artist in 1900; inventory number KMS1658, on view in Room 224.

Peder Severin Krøyer · 1899 · Oil on canvas · Danish painting · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

SMK's exhibition text by Peter Nørgaard Larsen explains the construction of the picture. Krøyer creates a diagonal movement from the boys in the foreground to the ships on the horizon. The ships, and the viewer's gaze, move to the right and meet the white moonbeam, which leads back to the boy and the beach at Skagen. With this simple but grand composition, the museum writes, Krøyer reaffirmed his narrative about the bright summer nights at Skagen, a theme shared by many paintings of the period about the relationship between people, the sea and light, and one particularly beloved of the Vitalist movement in literature and art.

A further museum text adds that Krøyer sent the painting to the World's Fair in Paris in 1900. Painted on the threshold of a new century, the children and youth stand for renewal and a belief in the future; for a painter who was for long periods darkened by depression, the dominant blue is described as the blue of hope rather than of melancholy.

How it was painted

The record notes that the work was made at Skagen in the summer of 1899, and that Krøyer mentions his work on it twice in letters to his patron Heinrich Hirschsprung in June 1899. Krøyer was born in Stavanger on 23 July 1851 and raised in Copenhagen. He entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a boy, studied later under Léon Bonnat in Paris, and from 1882 spent the months from June to October at Skagen. SMK's biography describes his specialty as the half-light of Skagen's bright summer evenings, captured in large paintings executed outdoors. He died at Skagen in 1909, aged 58.

Where it went

SMK bought the painting directly from the artist at the Charlottenborg spring exhibition on 31 March 1900 (catalogue number 248). Its loan history includes Dreams of a Summer Night at the Hayward Gallery in London (1986), the Pushkin Museum in Moscow (1989), Luz del norte at the Reina Sofía in Madrid and three further venues (1995-96), and L'heure bleue de Peder Severin Krøyer at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (2021). It hangs in Room 224.

Why it is in Mura

The painting belongs to Mura's Nordic Light collection, filed as quiet: a moonlit sea, distant sails and two bathers in the blue stillness of a Skagen evening.