Summer Evening at Skagen. The Artist's Wife and Dog by the Shore

Krøyer had a name for the light in this painting. He called it l'heure bleue, the blue hour, that short stretch after sunset when the sea and sky settle into the same deep blue and the line between them nearly disappears. Skagen sits at the very top of Denmark, where two seas meet, and in summer the northern dusk stretches on for ages. The woman walking the shore is his wife Marie, with their dog Rap beside her and the moon laid out in a pale streak on the water. Krøyer painted the blue hour again and again through the 1890s. He and Marie had married two years before this, both of them painters. Her face turns away from us, toward the water.