MURA · THE COLLECTION · PEDER SEVERIN KRØYER

Summer Evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach

Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach is an oil painting by Peder Severin Krøyer from 1893, showing the painters Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer walking along the shore at Skagen in the evening. The finished canvas, 100 by 150 centimetres, belongs to Skagens Museum; the image used here is Krøyer's oil study for it, in the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen.

Peder Severin Krøyer · 1893 · Oil on canvas · Nordic painting · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

Two figures walk along the shoreline as the beach and sea merge into the soft blue of evening. Wikipedia describes the two women strolling together during the blue hour, "when the horizon is almost dissolved in the evening mist". Anna Ancher, born at Skagen in 1859, was the only Skagen painter native to the village; Marie Krøyer, a painter as well, had married Krøyer on 23 July 1889.

How it was painted

Krøyer was born in Stavanger in 1851 and first came to Skagen in 1882, when it was a remote fishing village at the northern tip of Denmark. He became a central figure of the Skagen Painters, the Scandinavian artists who gathered there from the late 1870s, drawn by the light of the coast and by the fishing community, and who met at Brøndums Hotel.

Wikipedia records that he made four preparatory studies before painting the final canvas in September 1893, and quotes his own account: after about a month of studies, "one beautiful morning I started to paint up on the canvas and on the evening of the fourth day the picture was as it stands." An exhibition at the Hirschsprung Collection in 1990 showed that the composition was based on Krøyer's own photographs of the two women. The Hirschsprung study reproduced here is dated June 1893 and measures 38.5 by 60 centimetres; its inventory number is 222.

Where it went

The finished painting was first owned by the opera singer Lilli Lehmann. It was sold in 1978 to the newspaper publisher Axel Springer for 520,000 Danish kroner, and in 1986 his widow gave it to Denmark in memory of the rescue of the Danish Jews in 1943. It is at Skagens Museum, founded in 1908 in the dining room of Brøndums Hotel by Krøyer, Michael Ancher, Laurits Tuxen, the pharmacist Victor Klæbel and the hotelier Degn Brøndum. The reproduction is the Google Art Project file of the Hirschsprung study on Wikimedia Commons.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Nordic Light collection with a serene mood: the blue hour of a Danish summer evening, with two people and a long beach.

What you hear in the app

Follow the edge of the water. It draws a long, gentle route through the painting, towards two women walking together.

They are Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer. Peder Severin Krøyer painted this summer evening at Skagen's southern beach in eighteen ninety-three. The blue evening light is central to the scene.

Look at how little separates the sea from the sky. The horizon is there, but the colours seem to share the same quiet air. Against that broad blue space, the women's pale dresses become small points of brightness.

We cannot hear their conversation. We do not need to invent one. Their closeness and the direction of their walk give us enough to imagine the rhythm of being beside another person.

Now let your eye return along the shore. The open sand is not simply empty space around the subject. It gives the walk its distance and the evening its room to breathe.

Try allowing the picture to remain that simple: two people, a familiar shore, and light changing slowly around them.