Botando el barco. Skagen

In the early 1880s a fishing village at the northern tip of Denmark filled up each summer with painters. Skagen had hard clear light, a working shore, and fishermen who would stand still enough to be studied, and a Swede named Oscar Björck came up in 1882 on the urging of his friend, the painter Krøyer. This is the largest of the canvases he made there, and it shows the ordinary labour that drew the colony north. The man at the bow is a local fisherman, Ole Svendsen, who turns up again in the Anchers' pictures of the same beach. Björck laid the paint on thick, so the sand looks coarse and the surf holds its foam. Everything here was worked outdoors, in front of the boat itself.