Skagens Museum

Inside Skagens Museum there is a dining room that once belonged to a hotel. It comes from Brøndums Hotel, the inn at the northern tip of Denmark where the Skagen painters ate, drank and argued in the 1880s and 1890s, and it was in that room, on 20 October 1908, that the museum was founded. Among the founders were the painters Michael Ancher, P. S. Krøyer and Laurits Tuxen, with the town pharmacist and Degn Brøndum, the hotel's owner. When the architect Ulrik Plesner's museum building opened next door in 1928, the room was moved in and kept as it was.

Most of the pictures show the place right outside. Krøyer's Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach has two women in white walking along the shore in the blue evening light, Anna Ancher and his wife Marie, and it began with photographs he took of them after a dinner party in 1892. His later Midsummer Eve Bonfire on Skagen Beach gathers the artists and their Skagen friends around the fire. Oscar Björck, a Swedish member of the colony, painted local fishermen pushing their boat out into the surf.

Anna Ancher was the only one of the Skagen painters born in the town. She was a daughter of the Brøndums, and her Sunlight in the Blue Room, from 1891, shows her own daughter Helga crocheting in a room of the family hotel, with a patch of yellow sun on the blue wall beside her.