Rosas

Krøyer painted this in the summer of 1893 in Skagen, a fishing town at the northern tip of Denmark where a colony of artists gathered for the long, clear northern light. The woman reading under the enormous white rose bush is his wife Marie, in the garden of a house they rented. Their dog Rap sleeps at her feet. Beside her stands a second empty deckchair, the one the painter himself would have been sitting in. Krøyer had spent time in Paris and absorbed the French Impressionists, and you can feel it in the way the sunlight breaks through the leaves and scatters across her dress and the gravel. The rose bush is an old variety called Alba Maxima, so heavy with bloom that it almost hides the house behind it.