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THE SKAGEN ARTISTS’ COLONY

JIM BURNS

For a period between roughly 1870 and 1910 artists’ colonies flourished in Europe and the United States. Some of the locations are still remembered for their association with art. In the United Kingdom St Ives is an obvious example, and there were others such as Staithes and Walberswick. In France Pont Aven and Grez-sur-Loing come to mind. In the United States, Provincetown. The list is quite extensive. Some colonies lasted longer than others, and they varied in size and importance. Many, though not all of them, were based in coastal towns and villages. Skagen, a key Danish colony, has much of interest to offer in terms of the artists attracted to it, and the work they produced.

Skagen is situated at the northernmost part of Jutland. In the late-nineteenth century it was not an easy place to get to, especially as the railway line hadn’t then reached Skagen and there were no proper roads. It was easier to travel by boat from Sweden than it was to attempt an overland journey from Copenhagen. But some artists had managed to find their way there. Martinus Rorbye visited in 1833 and again in the 1840s. Later, the poet and painter Holger Drachmann arrived and was “instantly fascinated by the spectacular nature and the life and environment he found along the coast”. The main occupation for the inhabitants was fishing from small boats launched from the beach. The population amounted to around 2,000. There was an inn, owned by Erik and Ane Hedvig Brandum, who also ran a grocer’s shop. They had six children, one of whom, Anna, would play a major role in the life of the artists’ colony.

The young artist Michael Ancher and his friend Karl Madsen first visited Skagen in 1874. They came again in 1875, accompanied by Viggo Johansen and Lauritz Tuxen. They all knew each other from their time as students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. They had not been happy there, partly because “the teachers at the Academy would not compromise with the time-honoured artistic ideals that belonged to the past”. The new approaches to painting that were being developed in Paris had made little or no impact on Denmark. Unconventional ideas, such as “plein air” painting, were often frowned on, along with subject matter like the lives of ordinary people.

As the number of artists in Skagen began to accumulate, Anna Brandum, youngest daughter of the hotel proprietor, started to take note of what they were doing : “Although Anna was just a big schoolgirl when the first of the young artists started visiting Skagen, she got so engaged in following their work that she herself started drawing and painting”. Her parents were enlightened enough to recognise her talent for these subjects, and when, in 1875, her sisters were sent to a domestic science school in Copenhagen, she was allowed to enrol at a private painting school for women. She studied there for three years during the winter months, returning each summer to mix with the artists in Skagen. She had developed enough as an artist to have her work hung alongside that of Michael Ancher in an exhibition in Charlottenborg. They would later marry. Ancher was already an established artist, his 1880 painting, “Will he round the Point?”, having attracted attention. It shows a group of fishermen looking out to sea and considering the fate of a ship, though it’s not actually seen on the canvas. It seems somewhat staged in the way the fishermen are grouped, and doesn’t to my mind have the natural feeling that I find in something like Anna Ancher’s portrait, “Old man whittling sticks”.

Some of the Skagen artists, though not including the Anchers, headed for Paris, determined to see for themselves what the painters there were doing. It’s said that “The consequence of their extensive travel activities were soon reflected in the artists’ production, where sunshine and peaceful idyll were replaced by cloudy skies and everyday chores, while the brushwork became more concise and the choice of colours was dominated by brown, grey, blue and dark green”.

The Anchers did receive an introduction to new French painting through meeting Peder Severin Kroyer at an international exhibition in Vienna. Michael Ancher had a painting in the exhibition and Kroyer, who had travelled widely in France, Spain and Italy, guided the Anchers, making their first trip abroad, around the French section, explaining its various aspects. They, in turn, told Kroyer about Skagen and the artists there. Intrigued, he made a visit in June 1882, though his initial reaction was not favourable. The weather was bad and the accommodation at Brandum’s far below a standard he was used to. Kroyer was a successful artist, made money with his paintings, and expected better things. However, he persevered and began to paint, though it seems that his presence did, at first, annoy Michael Ancher who felt that the “famous and much travelled Kroyer was encroaching on his turf and robbing him of his daily bread by painting some of the same motifs that he had secretly been preserving for himself”. It’s easy to see how the Anchers, who had settled in Skagen permanently and were not, like so many of the artists, simply summer visitors, might incline to the view that they had priority of sorts to certain scenes and subjects. Generally, things were beginning to move: “In the course of the 1880s, naturalist figures and open-air painting unfolded at full speed among the artists in Skagen”.

It's interesting, with that in mind, to note that Kroyer in some ways did, in fact, capture certain aspects of the Skagen lifestyle in his work. There is a well-known painting, “Hip hip hurra!”, by Kroyer which shows a group of artists and their wives gathered around a table and raising their glasses in a toast. They are all identifiable, including Anna Ancher, with her daughter, though it’s likely that, as the painting was worked on over a number of years, not everyone who was at the original gathering may be in it. A second Kroyer group portrait, “Artists’ luncheon at Brandums Hotel”, likewise left a record of life at Skagen, though it’s noticeably an all-male gathering with more than a few bottles on the table. Paintings like these represented the bohemian side of activities among the artists, or at least the lighter aspects of it. Georg Brandes was a critic and “standard bearer for the modern breakthrough of art in Denmark”. He left a somewhat cryptic account of get-togethers like the one in Kroyer’s portrait : “The entire company sat from morning till evening around the table at Brandum’s, incessantly eating, drinking, debating, contradicting, damning. Once or twice a day everybody would get up from the table to go for a swim”.

I can only assume that Brandes was in Skagen during the summer months, and this was probably the case with some of the artists. They might, therefore, have looked on a trip to Skagen as a break from their usual occupations of painting, teaching, or whatever, and not necessarily a time for doing some serious work. And Brandes may only have experienced an occasional luncheon of the kind he described. The fact is that most artists’ colonies had only a small permanent group of painters at their centre and the rest came for a month or two when the weather was fine. They didn’t only include artists. Writers, journalists and, as word of Skagen spread to Copenhagen and other cities in Scandinavia, the merely curious, came to view what was happening. I wonder if any novels or short stories were written about Skagen? There were, no doubt, enough rumours involving rifts and romances to provide material for them.

If male artists dominated in Skagen there were, nonetheless, some talented women painters present. Anna Ancher was a leading member of the Skagen community and a major painter whose work has lasted. At the time of writing there is currently an exhibition of her paintings at the Dulwich Gallery in London. She may not have been a flamboyant artist and her canvases are usually of domestic scenes. “The Girl in the Kitchen” is a particularly fine example of her quiet but subtle approach, with its emphasis on light and shade. And “Sunshine in the Blue Room” is equally effective in its use of colour and the effects of sunlight.

There is a delightful portrait of the Norwegian artist, Oda Krohg, painted by her husband, Christian Krohg, and titled “Bohemian Girl”. Colourfully clothed, and far less formal in dress and demeanour than other Skagen women like Anna Ancher and Marie Kroyer, she seems to have enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle, as well as being a successful painter. Christian Krohg himself was noted for his radical social views, and his novel, Albertine, the story of a poor girl driven by poverty into prostitution, caused a sensation when it was published in 1886.

I mentioned Marie Kroyer, the wife of P.S. Kroyer. She was described as an “outstandingly beautiful young woman”. Born Marie Triepke, she was well-educated and came from an affluent family. If the accounts I’ve read are accurate, the marriage was not a happy one, nor did she settle easily into the Skagen artistic community. She was said to be “cold and egocentric, someone who wished to isolate herself from society by creating her own self-contained world of aesthetic reverie….Much less sociable than Kroyer, she was also perhaps more intelligent and sophisticated”. There are some intriguing portraits of her. One, “A Young Woman, Marie Triepke, Sitting in a Boat”, painted in 1884 by Bertha Wegmann, is striking and captures some of Marie’s perhaps elusive charm. The 1889 “Portrait of the Artist’s wife, Marie”, shows her in a happy mood but, from the same year, Marie’s “Self-Portrait” seems to me to point to a darker personality, at once more brooding and inward looking. The Kroyer marriage broke up in 1902 when she met a young Swedish composer, Hugo Alfven, and left her husband and child to go and live with him. Kroyer’s mental state began to deteriorate shortly after.

It has been said that, though Skagen continued to attract artists in the 1890s, its role as a catalyst for those wishing to stand apart from the influence of the Copenhagen artistic establishment was less pronounced. One account of the colony refers to a “modern breakthrough”, and it had been made by the mid-1890s. It could be indicative of the impact of that “breakthrough”, and the fact that the colony now had a place in history, that, by 1905 or so, there was already talk of establishing a museum to display the work of the Skagen pioneers. The railway was bringing more and more visitors to Skagen, most of them tourists rather than artists.

This short essay provides only a brief introduction to the Skagen Artists’ Colony. Numerous painters, poets, and critics were there at one time or another. I’ve mentioned a few of them. But I think it is obvious that Skagen played an important role in bringing Danish art up-to-date, and finding a place for it in a wider context. It may be that none of the painters were originators in terms of breaking completely new ground. But they were very good at what they did. They used their natural skills and their training, absorbed lessons from elsewhere, primarily Paris, and produced a fresh approach which resulted in attractive and memorable works of art.