Peder Severin Krøyer
Leader of the Skagen Painters.
P.S. Krøyer painted the light at Skagen – sunlit beach promenades and the blue hour. He was born in Stavanger and grew up in Denmark.
Peder Severin Krøyer was born in 1851 in Stavanger in Norway. His mother was not considered able to care for him, so he grew up with his aunt and her husband, the zoologist Henrik Krøyer, in Copenhagen. He entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen while still a teenager and graduated in 1870.
From 1877 to 1881 he studied in Paris under the portrait painter Léon Bonnat and encountered the Impressionists. In 1882 he came for the first time to Skagen at the northern tip of Jutland. A circle of painters was already there, among them Michael and Anna Ancher, and Krøyer soon became its focal point.
Among his best-known works is Hip, Hip, Hurrah! of 1888, which shows a party among the Skagen Painters in a sunny garden. It belongs to the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Summer Evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach of 1893, with Marie Krøyer and Anna Ancher on the beach in blue evening light, is in the Skagens Museum. He also painted large commissioned group portraits of scientists and industrialists.
Krøyer was a virtuoso draughtsman and colourist. He captured both the dazzling midday light and the blue hour, when sea and sky almost merge. His technique was sure and rapid, but his compositions were carefully thought out and often based on photographs and sketches. He was also a skilled portraitist, and his quick sketches of his friends at Skagen give a vivid picture of the colony’s everyday life.
In 1889 he married the painter Marie Triepcke. The marriage became unhappy, partly because of his recurring mental illness, and she left him for the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén. They divorced in 1905. Krøyer was hospitalised several times and almost lost his sight towards the end. He died in Skagen in 1909. Today he is Denmark’s best-loved 19th-century painter.