MURA · THE COLLECTION · PEDER SEVERIN KRØYER

Midsummer Eve Bonfire on Skagen’s Beach

Midsummer Eve Bonfire on Skagen's Beach is a large oil painting by Peder Severin Krøyer, finished in 1906, showing the artists' colony and townspeople of Skagen gathered around a St John's Eve fire. It measures 149.5 by 257 centimetres and belongs to Skagens Museum in Denmark, where it is recorded as Dep. 5.

Peder Severin Krøyer · 1906 · Oil on canvas · Nordic painting · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

Firelight gathers a community beneath the long blue twilight of a Skagen summer. The Commons record lists who is in the crowd: Krøyer's daughter Vibeke, the mayor Otto Schwartz and his wife Alba, Michael Ancher, Degn Brøndum, Anna Ancher, the writer Holger Drachmann and his third wife Soffi, the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén, and Marie Krøyer. Wikipedia adds the painter Laurits Tuxen and Captain P. K. Nielsen.

How it was painted

Krøyer, born in Stavanger in 1851, had painted at Skagen since 1882 and belonged to the group of Scandinavian artists who met each summer at Brøndums Hotel. Wikipedia records that he first sketched the midsummer bonfire in 1892, and that in 1903 he took his easel onto the beach at Skagen Østerby to make an extensive preparatory study. The finished painting took about fourteen years from first sketch to completion.

Those were hard years. His eyesight failed progressively over his last decade, and after 1900 his health declined with syphilis, leading to several stays in mental hospitals; he went on painting while partly blind. He thought this picture too dark, especially the sky. He died at Skagen on 21 November 1909, aged 58. Wikipedia reports that the painting is now counted among the most significant works of the Skagen Painters and is often called his magnum opus.

Where it went

The painting is at Skagens Museum, which Krøyer himself helped found in 1908 with Michael Ancher, Laurits Tuxen, the pharmacist Victor Klæbel and the hotelier Degn Brøndum, in the dining room of Brøndums Hotel. The museum's own building opened on 22 September 1928 and now holds more than 1,800 works. The reproduction is the Google Cultural Institute file on Wikimedia Commons, which cites the museum's catalogue Krøyer - i internationalt lys.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Nordic Light collection with a golden mood: fire against the blue night of the far north, and most of the colony in one picture.