by Tom Blass
The artist was the husband of the darker haired of the women. He was Peder Severin Krøyer, and his wife Marie was once described as the most beautiful woman in Copenhagen. She, also, was a brilliant artist, as was her companion in the painting, Anna Ancher, who was married to another painter, Michael. These two couples were the nucleus of the colony known as the Skagen artists, who fell in love with each other and with Skagen, putting both an inaccessible corner of Jutland and themselves on the map with their beauty and intrigues and natural gifts. That was all some time ago, but something of them still lingers in that blade-like Scandinavian light and in the tourist shops and museums their legacy bequeathed.
Most of Skagen sits on the Baltic side of the Skagen Odde peninsula, which pokes from the top of Jutland like a fruit knife. The rest of it, a sort of appendage connected by a thread of road, faces the North Sea side. Maybe Skagen is the only town that fronts two seas in this way.
Before the artists’ discovery of Skagen there was little there at all. A fishing community and the open boats which, at the end of each fishing trip, were hauled up upon the beaches, the town having no harbour. It was far from anywhere that wasn’t itself far from anywhere, and notwithstanding the train that runs up via Frederikshaven from Aarhus, in the centre of Jutland, it still is, by the standards of a small country endowed with a state-of-the-art transport system.
I took that train which lumbers through the bunched and compact fields and forests. Then for the last twenty minutes of the journey we were rumbling through a sea of heathland, the contours frozen, dark, cropped grasses trembling, and though my companions in the carriage were mostly high-school students in bright colours fixated on their iPhones, the ground across which we travelled was for me reminiscent of a handful of watercolours my great-grandfather, a Scot who married a Dane, had painted more or less contemporaneously with the Skagen set – of which he must have known but to which he did not belong.
This man, John Connell, painted dark shallow-roofed cottages nestling in the folds of that same landscape. The handful of his paintings that remain have darkened with age but they still coincided with the colours I now saw, the ochres and sombre greens and the saturated blues above. And he painted the tan-sailed fishing boats that plied the Jutland coast.
The little train pulled into Skagen, and I followed my nose past low-rise office buildings (the Danish Fishermen’s Association, a firm of marine architects) to a small apartment off the pedestrianised main road, along which a handful of tourists ambled, gazing desultorily in the windows of clothes shops, apparently unable to find what they were searching for or unsure as to what that might be.
Of Skagen the town, its most obvious feature was that almost without exception the houses, municipal buildings and church are painted mustard yellow, and their roofs tiled in red. Custard and rhubarb, mustard and beef. This, I thought, might have worked had it not been that the paint finish was immaculate, not an ounce of weathering apparently permitted. Looking harder at the buildings, I concluded that the logic had run along the following lines. Many, but not all of them date to the mid-nineteenth century and have enormous value as examples of vernacular architecture. The newer buildings deviate, but it is difficult to impose ‘heritage’ on a modern building; far easier to repaint an old one. So all of them have been ‘aged’ by making them all new.
Yet the scale was pleasing. I took lunch from a hot-dog stand, the vendor generous with the mustard and ketchup.
That the greater part of Skagen is turned over to a marine industrial zone was also a pleasant surprise – it would mean I wouldn’t spend the entirety of my time in museums or dawdling on beaches. Also I was encouraged to find a town maintaining links with the sea that transcended the picturesque. But with its grey and blue corrugated rectangles and chimneys and fork-lift trucks, it looked difficult to crack. I carried no letter of introduction to the men in hard hats and blue boiler suits cycling urgently from one noisy shed to another. Lorries flew by on the quayside road. And where were the women in muslin dresses with gauzy veils and charming smiles, the palette-dabbing artists on the dunes?
I slept well in my apartment opposite a lingerie shop. On the outside the building was no less custard and rhubarb than the rest; inside it was light and airy but warm, and the geometry of the building had a pleasant, dignified and quiet demeanour. I woke to the sound of a butterfly bashing against the window somewhat poetically.
Freud said that when two people make love there are four involved. Where the two big seas, the Baltic and the North, clash it also gets a little complicated. The eastern part of the North Sea where it becomes the corridor that takes it to the Baltic is called the Skagerrak. East of a line that starts at the tip of Jutland and runs north to the Swedish–Norwegian border, this then becomes the Kattegat. Whether these smaller, more local, rich-in-consonant waters represent distinct seas in their own right is a subject upon which even the dictionary is confused, seas not being as easily taxonomised as birds or insects:
The Skagerrak is a strait running between the southeast coast of Norway, the southwest coast of Sweden, and the Jutland peninsula of Denmark, connecting the North Sea and the Kattegat sea area, which leads to the Baltic Sea. The Kattegat is a continuation of the Skagerrak and may be seen as either a bay of the Baltic Sea, a bay of the North Sea, or, in traditional Scandinavian usage, neither of these.
For mariners, the point itself, Grenen, a couple of miles north-east of Skagen, is one of the black spots of the North Sea. Kattegat translates as something like ‘cat gap’, implying that its straits and shallows are so narrow that only such a slender beast could pass through them. In the age of sail literally thousands of vessels were torn apart by the currents here.
During the American Civil War a North Carolina ship was wrecked upon the point and its crew rescued by local fishermen, the ship’s captain recuperating at the home of Ole Christian Lund, commissioner of sand drifts, who at the time was planting grasses to secure the dunes against erosion and prevent the land from slipping away. In jest he told the captain that he could ‘do with a slave’ to help him with this task. Some months after the captain returned home, a ship anchored close to Skagen, a jolly boat came ashore, and Jan, a Carolinian slave, made nervous landfall accompanied by instructions to whip him every day to ensure productivity. The letter also promised a wife for Jan on request, so that Skagen might start its own slave colony – which the commissioner wrote to say would not be required. Jan may have been delivered from slavery, but his was still a far from happy lot. The locals, few of whom possessed the worldly wisdom of the commissioner of sand drifts, clustered around him, prodding, poking and disbelieving. Only a handful had even heard of the existence of black people.
Jan was not whipped, and he was paid a servant’s salary for his labour, but he was lonely and not readily accepted into this community of fair-skinned, rough-bearded fishermen, except, apparently, when he ventured to buy a round of drinks. It is debated in Skagen whether, after Jan’s death, he was buried in the consecrated churchyard or alone in the dunes with his pet monkey, Jocko, another stranger shipwrecked in a strange land.
Maria Groes, whom I met at the tourist office by the harbour, gently besieged me with statistics proving that Grenen had become an internationally known attraction. I can’t remember quite how many tens of thousands of visitors arrived every year, and how they broke down by age, nationality, long or short stay, but to my mild annoyance it was apparent that even at the end of the holiday season, when I had a holiday apartment at a knock-down price, many of those whom she was paid to encourage to visit were doing so at the same time as me.
Close to the place where the seas (whether two, three or four) meet, the road stops at a large car park with a gift shop, toilets and information stand, before a path continues through the dunes towards the actual point, which is not very far, perhaps a kilometre or so, the Baltic on the right to the east and the North Sea to the west. I thought I would have Grenen to myself; Spurn Head, another anvil betwee
n two bodies of water, had been very obliging in that way. But in mid-September this short tongue of sand was a gangway for a thin but persistent trickle of visitors, for the most part teenage school groups, the girls linking arms and singing in some malevolent approximation of harmony and the boys trying to distract them, and which, when it reached the very end, bunched up like a swarm of flies caught in a bottle.
Social anthropologists like to divide the process of the rite de passage into three stages. First comes the preliminal – the build-up and anticipation; second, the act itself, whether wearing special clothes or being confined to a mud hut; third is the postliminal stage, in which the subject emerges with a new name, a sore and abbreviated penis or some other change in status and identity. But it is the second stage that is most important, for it is in this liminal zone that the act of transformation, however cursory or brief, occurs. Like crossing the equator (which counts) it is irreversible.This is the ritual at Grenen, to take a few yards into the foaming water while your partner, friends, parents or children (or a solitary writer) photograph your double baptism, one foot in each sea. It appears to make its participants happy, for they beam and giggle beneath the strong Scandinavian sun.
I also dabbled in the surging surf, another quest fulfilled, but it was a different experience for me. I’d intended to come to Skagen for as long as I’d intended to write this book. I saw it as one of the three frontiers of the North Sea, and so different from the first that I had visited, Kingsdown on the coast of Kent, where the drama of the Channel cliffs gives way to the gloomy flats of Thanet but no ceremony or beacon marks the change.
I had noticed something as I joined the throng of pilgrims. Where the point tapers (coming to a head, as it were) both seas were within vision but also earshot. They sounded different: the grey, more easterly sea murmured contentedly while the deep blue waves of the North Sea announced their arrival from great distances with something like a quiet, triumphal roar. It was comforting to see that the distinction was more than a cartographer’s abstraction. Where the two meet they rush past each other myopically in their exuberance. Meanwhile, out in the Baltic, large numbers of freight ships sat glumly in the distance, waiting for pilots to take them into Frederikshaven a dozen miles down the coast.
After my irreversible passage, I walked back along the North Sea side of the point. Whereas the Baltic shore was clean, the tide scarcely noticeable at all, the North Sea had brought gifts of kelp and strands of bright green seaweed, broken crabs, cods’ heads, half a dozen gloves (none matching), strewn out within a dozen yards of each other, the usual beer cans, but most pleasingly three dolphin vertebrae, almost clean of flesh but still odorous, which I stuffed into a bag before winding my way randomly through the dunes, almost tripping over the grave of a poet, Holger Drachmann, and moseying around the bunkers built by the Germans during their wartime occupation of Denmark.
I’m as wary of museums as I am of all forms of taxidermy, but Skagen possesses a handful of some of the finest in Europe, not by dint of their size but through their ability to sustain the flickering light of the past, so easily killed off by digital trickery and ambitious curatorship. At the (custard-coloured) house of Michael and Anna Ancher I paid my kroner, and a woman of a certain age, long greying hair tied in a loose ponytail, handed me a pair of the felt slippers that the Russians call valenki that I might not disturb the ghosts or scuff the wooden floors.
Of all the Skagen set, Anna was the only one born there, the daughter of Erik Brondum, keeper of the inn named after him. Painters had been visiting Skagen for decades, but in 1874 art students Michael Ancher and Karl Madsen visited for the summer and fell in with the teenage Anna and her cousins Martha and Henriette Moller. The next year they returned with a friend, Viggo Johansen, and a few weeks of radiant Scandinavian summer fun yielded three engagements: Michael Ancher to the innkeeper’s daughter, Karl Madsen to Henriette, and Viggo Johansen to Martha. All six went to live in Copenhagen, but hurried back for holidays, attracting an ever-growing coterie of other artists, among them P. S. Krøyer and Marie Triepcke. They had first met in Paris and came to Skagen after marrying in Copenhagen in 1889.
The Skagen set painted each other to an extent that verged on the incestuous, almost as if in the grip of a need to create a myth of themselves not only as artists but as a realisation of an idyll. Krøyer painted Marie almost obsessively and with ecstatic reverence: Marie in the garden with her beloved chocolate Labrador, by the seashore with their daughter Vibecke, smiling, in repose. Marie’s portraits of herself are very much darker.
Vain they may have been, but the artists were not oblivious to Skagen’s other inhabitants, in particular the fishermen, whom they depicted both on the beach, hauling in boats or nets, and in less heroic moments, gossiping at the shop or the inn. Or in death. The Drowned Man depicts a fisherman laid out on a table, only his face and the torso of his yellow oilskin illuminated by frail sunlight through a small window. His wife clutches a lifeless hand, and sea-booted friends look on from the shadows with quiet, grim pity. Artists and fishermen held each other in mutual respect and were of necessity close. The fishermen depicted in the paintings, with precursive echoes of the socialist realism that would emerge from the Soviet Union in forthcoming decades, were identifiable individuals, not generic proletarian heroes.
Many of these paintings are now kept in Michael and Anna’s house, which is more or less intact after being bequeathed to the town by their daughter in the 1930s. It is an elegant lived-in building, in which it feels akin to burglary to wander among such intimate belongings and effects. I was mortified when my mobile phone began to ring (though there was no one to hear it) as I stood before a portrait of Anna Ancher, her nose distinctively hooked as a consequence of a teenage fall from a hayrick in the year that she met her husband-to-be.
Close by is the Skagens Museum, the erstwhile Brondums Hotel. It is more obviously a museum than the house, with its shop and galleries. It also houses the famous picture of Marie and Anna on the beach at dusk – but only by the skin of its teeth. Three years after its completion Summer Evening at Skagen Sonderstrand was bought by a German actress, Lilli Lehmann-Kalisch, and lost to the world until it reappeared in a Danish auction house in 1978 with an estimated sale price of 173,000 kroner (£13,700). Skagens Museum raised double that sum but was still outbid by the German media baron Axel Springer. The hammer had fallen at 520,000 kroner, the highest sum ever paid for a Danish painting. The Danish art world was shocked by the prospect of this masterpiece, only recently recovered, leaving the country. However, two days later Springer called the museum to say that he would donate the painting, but wanted to have it in his home until his death, an event which occurred six years after the auction.
Close by is a painting of Marie alone: a three-quarter-length portrait, she stands gazing out at the waves with her Labrador by her side. Also nearby is the picture of a midsummer-eve bonfire on the beach, around which, smiles blazing in the reflected light of its flames, stand the great and good of Skagen, their children sitting on the sand. To the innocent eye, the theme is wholesome communality, but in the background, eyes shining with love, Marie stands arm in arm with another man, not Krøyer, her husband and the author of the painting, who by the time it was complete had already lost her to her companion at the bonfire.
Around the height of Skagen’s incarnation as the playground of the Danish art world, a British travel writer, Charles Edwardes, author of Sardinia and the Sardes, visited Skagen by bicycle, having pedalled through a sodden afternoon along the seashore. When Edwardes arrived in Skagen, the only hotel was Brondums. Arriving, dripping, at the door, he was soon ‘puddling up a clean, broad pine-wood staircase and into a bedchamber of metropolitan luxury’, and after the ‘angelic visitation of a white-capped maid’, who brought him warm water, he looked out on to the red roofs, much sand, a lighthouse ‘and a strip of sea in as pretty a state of leaden perturbation as ever evoked anxiety in the heart of a fisherman’s wife’.
Edwardes also made the pilgrimage to the point at Grenen, but the weather was formidable. Sand was thrust in his face ‘with a blinding slap’, and many of the women of the party, incommoded by their skirts, vanished into the sandhills to recover from their exertions. In the evening he attended the St Hans Day celebrations with which he had timed his arrival to coincide. Excited young people made bonfires in the teeth of the wind and dared each other to jump over them. ‘One evoked great admiration by running this gauntlet on his hands and knees . . . until a tub-shabed dame slid from a sand-heap towards the fire and got him by the neck.’ Later a thousand people gathered in the screaming wind as the bonfire grew ever larger, before retreating to eat strawberries and cream, ‘a dream of epicurean deliciousness’, and drink sherry. ‘I have no idea, even now, who St Hans was,’ he reported, ‘but he must have been a very worthy gentleman.’
It is almost inevitable, given the year of his visit, that the Skagen set were present at the bonfire, but they, their dramas and still unfolding passions were unknown to the English cyclist.