Michael Ancher

At the very northern tip of Denmark, where two seas meet at Skagen, the light does something painters travel for, and in the 1870s a colony of them gathered in the fishing village to catch it. Michael Ancher arrived as a young man and never really left.

He painted the fishermen, big weathered men in oilskins hauling boats through the surf or standing in grave clusters on the beach, treating ordinary labourers with the seriousness usually saved for heroes. He married a local innkeeper's daughter, Anna, who became a painter of light-filled interiors many now rank above her husband.

Their yellow house in Skagen still stands as a museum, kept much as they left it. Ancher died there in 1927, in the village whose fishermen he had painted for half a century.