Soirée d'été sur la plage sud de Skagen

This came out of a real evening. In the summer of 1892, after a dinner at Kroyer's house in Skagen, at the northern tip of Denmark, the guests wandered down to the beach, and two of the women walked off along the shore. One is the painter's wife, Marie; the other is Anna Ancher, herself a fine painter and a close friend. Kroyer was after a very particular light the Danes call the blue hour, the stretch after sunset when sky and sea dissolve into the same soft blue and the horizon almost disappears. He made several studies over about a month, then painted the finished canvas fast, in four days, in September 1893. The white dresses are what hold the picture together, two pale shapes moving through all that blue.