Skagen: A tale of a beach

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 2003 by Berman, Patricia G

Originally a remote, somewhat forbidding, fishing outpost, it became a treasured artists' colony that gave rise to a whole new school of painting. Today this Danish community is primarily a popular vacation spot.

"The history of Skagen is a history of gales, and sand-drifts, and shipwrecks . . . . It is one of the wildest and most desolate spots in the world, yet within a couple hours' journey from fertile, peaceful and idyllic rustic landscapes. To the long straggling town of Skagen the railway will never penetrate . . . ."

-Murray's Handbook for Travelers in Denmark, 1875

SUCH DESCRIPTIONS AS THIS BECKONED ARTISTS and other intellectuals seeking inspiration in an "uncorruptcd" countryside to the town of Skagen in the late 19th century. Skagen occupies an extraordinary position at the northernmost tip of Denmark's Jutland. The churning seas, assisted by a triple reef system, grind everything that comes within reach of this spit of land into powder, producing the only large fine sandy beach in Scandinavia. Consequently, the early town was accessible only by small boat or by horse-drawn cart. Even Skagen's fishermen, who harvested one of the richest fishing grounds in Denmark, had to ply their trade from specially designed vessels.

However, in the 1880s, Skagen had become one of Scandinavia's most famous artists' colonies, a magnet for painters, writers and musicians from throughout the Nordic countries. Painters initially traveled to Skagen to record the town, its seas and its fishing population; they then began to paint its wide beaches, and then one another. In 1893 Denmark's most renowned artist, Peder Severin Kroyer (1851-1909), painted the most famous image of Skagen, Summer Night on the South Beach at Skagen. Far from the wild, untamable town described in tourist literature, the painting represents two women promenading quietly on the beach in the blue light of a summer night. The last warm rays of the sun pool in the footprints dotting the sand and gild the women's pale dresses. To the left, sea and sky dissolve into a continuous medium and to the right, the elliptical shoreline encloses the women. Hidden in the formal simplicity of this painting is a network of complex stories of the women, the artist and the social identity of the beach, for by 1893 the railway had indeed come to Skagen and the town was changing rapidly.

Founded in the 12th century, Skagen evolved into two villages, the "old" and the "new." They were located one-half mile apart and enveloped by large, shifting sand dunes. Over the years, the dunes had thwarted most attempts at agriculture (old fields were buried under the sand and only barley was grown between gales), obscured parts of the village and, in the latter 18th century, buried the church. The mail cart, which traveled from Fredrikshavn (22 miles to the south), provided the only land transportation to the town. Finnish painter Hanna Ronnberg (1862-1946) described the journey by land:

. . . we came out into the dunes and the speed decreased greatly, it was like riding in flour, up dune and down dune, foot by foot. Amongst other things we left our carriage and walked in the soft sand, until we became so tired that we had to return to our coach, and from it look upon magnificent nature in all its abundance . . . and one understood that here was the home of all the old stories and fairy tales, this was where Andersen was inspired to write his tale of the 'Dunes'. . . . Yes, it was a land of sagas, and now we drove straight into it, forgetting weariness and tiredness, the mind was open and receptive to new impressions and experiences.

Norwegian painter Christian Krohg (1852-1925), who first traveled to Skagen in 1879, described the journey by boat: "I sailed there one lovely summer's day with a pilot boat, for the steamships cannot dock there, as there is nothing which even appears to be a harbor, and the pilot boat had to remain several hundred feet outside. But we raised the flag, and then a rowing boat came. Even that could not go all the way in [to the coast]. For the last stretch we had to be carried on the back of the fisherman and then finally we stood on the beach of Skagen. I have never stepped on anything like it."

The slowing down, and then suspension, of time, which Ronnberg describes, and the exoticism of Krohg's transport echo the expectations of the earliest urban, travelers of Skagen as a "threshold" experience: In the mid-1850s, a couple of intellectuals, notably Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) and later the art historian Karl Madsen (1855-1938) and writer and artist Holgar Drachmann (1846-1908), visited the town. In the articles that they published in Copenhagen newspapers, they extolled the desolate beauty of the town: "Are you a painter? Then follow us up here. There are plenty of motifs," wrote Andersen.

Indeed, as early as the 1840s, small groups of artists, some of them quite notable and influential within Denmark, had begun to visit Skagen in the summer, registering the material culture of the town in sketches and canvases. This first generation of artists found their most compelling motifs in the lives of the fishermen whom they represented as Rousseauian heroes-battling the forces of nature, cut off from commerce with the mainland, at one with the sea. Marine painters were equally drawn to Skagen's extraordinary number of shipwrecks. Andersen described the town as a veritable ships' graveyard: "Ship after wrecked ship lay side by side: we drove through the corpse of a large three-masted schooner . . . past the half-buried spire of St. Laurentius church to Skagen's town. . . . I saw a pig in a little potato patch, tethered to a galleon head of 'Hope'. . . and then a colossal figure, another galleon head, 'Walter Scott,' from a stranded ship." As Danish artist Michael Ancher's (1849-1927) painting, The Lifeboat is Carried through the Dunes illustrates, the fishing community was preoccupied by vessels that approached the coast, for in addition to fishing, the town's economy was dependent on salvaging operations. Krohg reports over a dozen wrecks within the first few weeks of his first visit to Skagen, and he was appalled by the local fishermen's reactions: Watching the horizon, a cheer would go up when a ship foundered because it betokened a boost to the local economy.