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A summer lunch in a garden, glasses raised, sunlight coming through the trees. The people at the table are real, the painters and their families who spent their summers at Skagen, a fishing village at the northern tip of Denmark, in the 1880s. What looks like a snapshot took Krøyer nearly four years. The gathering itself had happened in the garden of Anna and Michael Ancher, and a visiting painter photographed it. Krøyer loved the photo and wanted to turn it into a large canvas. He carried his easel back to that same garden to work from life, and Michael Ancher chased him off, pointing out that he had bought the house precisely to get some privacy. So Krøyer finished it elsewhere, piece by piece, between 1884 and 1888. He kept the loose, sunlit touch he had picked up from the French painters, on a scene of his own northern circle.