Midsummer Eve Bonfire on Skagen Beach

Krøyer painted this large-scale canvas in 1906, near the end of his life, after the progressive eye disease that had already begun to compromise his vision. He and his artist colleagues had made the fishing village of Skagen, at Denmark's northernmost tip, their gathering point since the 1880s, and the annual Sankt Hans Eve bonfire on the beach was a ritual the colony celebrated together. The painting is one of the grandest of his late Skagen subjects, exhibited to considerable attention and now held in the Skagens Museum, which serves as the institutional custodian of the entire Skagen painters' legacy. Krøyer belongs to the Skagen Painters, a Danish school working in the tradition of Impressionism: plein-air observation, broken touch, shadow rendered as colour rather than black, and an interest in the play of natural and artificial light that connects him directly to Monet and to the Scandinavian strain of the movement. What sets him apart from French Impressionism is his insistence on populated coastal scenes and his particular sensitivity to the phenomenon of Danish summer twilight, the luminous blue hour that appears in painting after painting from this period.