Evening Atmosphere

For 50 years, from the mid 1870s, a colony of artists settled in Skagen, a fishing village situated on the northernmost  tip of Denmark. These artists were mostly painters, but the colony expanded to include sculptors, poets, architects, composers and musicians. They were attracted by the scenery and quality of the light in the area and took up plein air painting influenced partly by the French impressionists, although realist movements such as the Barbizon school also remained a very strong influence. They thus broke away from the rather rigid traditions of the academies of fine arts, espousing instead the trends they had learned in Paris. 

And although they came for the light, they produced a surprisingly large number of evening paintings

In the 1870s, inspired first by the new French Realism and later by Naturalism, many of the younger generation of Danish artists fled from the cities out to the country's more isolated regions, portraying human beings and their close relationship to the magnificent landscape.

In the beginning of their careeer the Skagen painters were best known for their naturalistic portrayals of fishermen, nature and life in and around the area. However, in the course of time, some of the painters and particulary P.S. Krøyer moved away from strictly painting cultural-historical depictions of the period. Instead they focused much more on colours and moods, lights and shadows and the beautiful skies around sunset.

One of the only five paintings we know that Eilif Peterssen made while visiting Skagen in 1883. It has darkened considerably since then, and it can be hard to make out all the details. The horizon is relatively high in the picture, perhaps inspired by Japanese art, which was at the height of fashion at this time. 

The orange yellow moon contrasts with the green lyme grass, while the sea can be glimpsed in the background.

The last large figure painting from P.S. Krøyer before his death in 1909. Here, he has gathered artists as well as local women and children around a Midsummer's Eve's bonfire on the beach.

The painting, started as sketches back in 1892 but not finished until 14 years later, is a tribute to the artists' colony, but Krøyer himself is not in the picture. This is the first time he depicts the locals together with the artists, with artists and the people from the middle classes positioned in the bright, left side of the painting, whilst the majority of the locals are placed on the darker right side.

Krøyer depicted the moods of romantic anecdotes, occasionally coloured with a soft and romantic, melancholic touch of bleakness.  

The mood of several of Krøyer's blue paintings reflects the so-called twilight hour, the “blue hour”, when the sky and the sea appear to float together in a diversity of blue tones and create the feeling of a nocturne.

Krøyer got the idea for the painting of Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer on the beach in June 1892 after a dinner party, which he and Marie hosted at their house in Skagen (today the office of the Vendsyssel branch of the Danish Nature Agency in Byfogedskoven). 

Anna and Michael Ancher, the writer Otto Benzon and his wife Emma, and the writer Sophus Schandorph and his wife Ida were the evening’s guests, and after dinner everyone walked down to the beach to enjoy the tranquil summer's evening.

In his autobiographical notes Michael Ancher described how ..

Several of the Skagen painters started out as marine painters, some of them remained so their whole career.

Xylander visited Skagen already in 1872, at the same time as Carl Locher, staying in Brøndum's Hotel. Most of his works from Skagen are from 1884, when he visited again.

The blue hour

Colours are often used to indicate a particular mood. Blue is generally used in language, music and painting to describe a quiet, melancholic and often somewhat romantic atmosphere. Works of music, both classical and jazz, often have titles, which include the colour blue: for example the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’s famous number ‘Kind of Blue’. 

The word “nocturne” is used to describe the same sort of mood, and is borrowed from the world of music, where it indicates a note in the scale, which can put us in the same mood as the colour blue.

Carl Locher was generally very keen to portray different kinds of weather and light effects on the shore, and he often portrayed an overcast sky, rain and storm. This one however depicts the bluish light of a September evening.

For many years Locher used a felt tent as his studio. This tent could be moved around on the shore so that he could be sheltered even in bad weather.

In 1889 Anna Ancher wrote a letter to colleague and fellow Skagen painter Viggo Johansen, asking him for advice: “The smallest one, 'Lene plucking' will, I think, not be discarded, but the larger one, 'Blue Room with Helga' (Evening prayers) I am a bit uncertain about, it is only the colour that I meant something with, the figure isn't terribly good, the motif looks a little unnatural, but Helga had heard a story and wanted to do the same thing as the girl in the story.”

Anna Ancher was the Skagen painter, who went furthest in dissolving the subject in favour of colours, surfaces and the moods and vagaries of light.

Several of her works have a completely different mood from that of the naturalistic paintings we typically associate with the Skagen painters.

Anna Ancher underlines the fact that the painting is primarily a surface of colours. She employed colours and shades as important elements in their own right, while the subject of the painting became less important.

In the words of the French painter Maurice Denis wrote, “Remember that a painting, before it is a war horse, a nude model or some other kind of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Michael and Anna Ancher have painted each other as equal discussion partners and artists, which is something quite rare in the art of the time. However if we compare Anna and Michael Ancher’s paintings of the private sphere, they naturally have certain motifs in common: the home, their daughter, close family members etc., but while several of Michael Ancher’s paintings from the private sphere primarily portray Anna Ancher as a middle-class wife undertaking tasks, for instance in her role as mother, Anna Ancher’s portraits of family life on the other hand is often a lot more intimate and provide the impression of not being staged.

The only known painting by Anna Ancher that is not based on an experienced reality, but was inspired by a dream Anna had. A picture that may very well be about faith and lack of faith. 

Although Anna grew up in a religious environment, she herself was not religious, and in her youth she was influenced by the cultural radical and atheistic artists who visited the artists' colony at the end of the 19th century.