Hip Hip Hurrah

Kroyer painted Hip Hip Hurrah in 1888, at the height of his engagement with the artists' colony at Skagen, the northernmost tip of Denmark, where a community of Scandinavian painters had gathered to work in the clear coastal light. The sitters are not anonymous figures: they are Kroyer's closest colleagues, including the painters Michael Ancher and Laurits Tuxen, along with their wives and companions. It is a document of a specific social world as much as it is a celebration of daylight and companionship. Kroyer had trained in Paris and absorbed the lessons of French Impressionism, but the Skagen pictures push that inheritance toward something more deliberate: the light is observed with almost scientific exactness, and the figures are rendered with a psychological particularity that keeps the work from becoming merely decorative. Hip Hip Hurrah entered the collection of the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden, where it remains one of the most recognised works of Scandinavian Naturalism. It was shown to broad acclaim at the Paris Salon of 1888, confirming Kroyer's standing as the leading figure of the Skagen circle.