斯卡恩海滩的夏夜——画家与妻子

This is the painter and his wife walking their own beach at dusk. By 1899 Peder Severin Kroyer had been coming to Skagen, the fishing village at the northern tip of Denmark, for close to twenty years, drawn by its long blue summer evenings when the light barely fades. Here he puts himself into the scene with his wife Marie, whom he had married in 1889, and their dog Rap, the three of them strolling the shore in that pale moonlit hour. Marie was a trained artist herself, and by this point their marriage was already under strain, though the picture keeps all of that below the surface and shows only the quiet walk. The Hirschsprung family, close friends of the painter, bought the work for their collection in 1901, and that friendship lasted until Kroyer died in 1909.