Skagens Museum

Skagens Kunstmuseer | Art Museums of Skagen
Skagens Museum was founded in 1908 in order to collect and preserve the works of the Skagen artists’ colony in the environment in which they were created.

Since 1928 the museum has resided in a building designed by the architect Ulrik Plesner. The Garden House, where many of the artists used to rent lodgings, and the old grain-drying warehouse where P.S.Krøyer established his studio in Skagen, can both be found in the museum’s atmospheric and evocative garden.

In 2014 Skagens Museum was merged with the two house and studio museums Anchers Hus – home to the artist couple Anna Ancher and Michael Ancher – and Drachmanns Hus – home to the poet and painter Holger Drachmann.

The Skagen Artists' Colony
From the end of the 1870s and up to the turn of the century, Skagen was an international meeting place for young artists. The artists shared the fact that they were inspired by naturalism and open-air painting and sought new places and motifs.

During the 1880s Skagen was transformed into an artists’ colony where there was room for both work and leisure. The artists’ preferred motifs were the fishermen working on the beach, the fishermen’s tiny cottages and the social life among the artists themselves.

The Skagen painters
Already in their lifetime the Skagen painters achieved world fame at significant exhibitions held abroad.

The most prominent Skagen painters are the Danish painters Anna Ancher and Michael Ancher and Peder Severin Krøyer. But also artists such as Holger Drachmann, who was both poet and painter, Viggo Johansen, Carl Locher, Laurits Tuxen and the Nordic artists Christian Krohg and Oscar Björck all contributed to putting Skagen on the map.