Mittsommernacht am Vejle-Fjord

This is a Danish midsummer eve, Sankt Hans aften, the shortest night of the year, painted by Harald Slott-Moller in 1904 on the shore of the Vejle Fjord. You might read it as pure landscape, the fjord under a luminous, not-quite-dark sky, but it is also a portrait. The seated woman in the striking red cape is the painter's wife, Agnes Slott-Moller, herself a painter, looking out over the water. The colour is deliberately strange, tuned to that Nordic twilight where day and night blur together, and the red of her cape carries meaning as much as description. More than a century on, in 2016, this canvas was chosen as one of ten works to represent Denmark in a pan-European art project.