Peder Severin Krøyer

Peder Severin Kroyer painted light on the northern coast better than almost anyone in Denmark. From the 1880s he was the leading figure among the artists who gathered at Skagen, a fishing village on the sandy tip of Jutland where two seas meet, drawn by the long clear light of the summer nights.

His best-known pictures catch the blue hour, that stretch of northern dusk when sky and sea turn the same deep silvery blue. In one, two women in white stroll the beach at the water's edge, one of them his wife Marie, herself a painter and a famous beauty. The mood is calm and a little melancholy.

Behind the serene surfaces his life darkened. Kroyer suffered from mental illness and gradually lost much of his sight, and his marriage to Marie broke apart. He kept working through it, painting the Skagen shore almost to the end, and died there in 1909, at 58.