Skagens Museum

Why it is renowned

The Skagen Painters were a colony of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian artists who gathered at Skagen from the late 1870s and brought the open-air painting they had learned in Paris.¹ The museum holds the largest collection of their work anywhere, from Anna and Michael Ancher to P.S. Krøyer and Laurits Tuxen.² Their paintings travel: in 2013 the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. showed the largest exhibition of Anna Ancher's work ever held in the United States.¹ Over a hundred of the museum's paintings were digitised for the Google Art Project, and Krøyer's Hip, Hip, Hurrah!, which hangs in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, is shown here in a three-dimensional digital version beside the place it was painted.³

The story

The museum was founded on 20 October 1908 in the dining room of Brøndums Hotel, with Michael Ancher, Krøyer and Tuxen on its first board beside the hotelier Degn Brøndum and the local pharmacist.³ Brøndum gave the hotel's old garden for a building in 1919, and the museum designed by Ulrik Plesner opened on 22 September 1928.³ The hotel's dining room, with its frieze of portraits the artists painted of one another, was moved into the museum.³ Anchers Hus and Drachmanns Hus joined it in 2014, and an extension by Friis & Moltke was finished in 2016.³ The collection counts some 1,800 works on display and in store.³

What to know it by

• Brøndum's dining room1892Ulrik Plesner and Thorvald BindesbøllThe artists' portrait frieze from Brøndums Hotel
• The museum building1928Ulrik PlesnerBuilt in the old hotel garden
• Anchers HusHome and studio of Anna and Michael Ancher
• The Garden HouseEarly home and studio of the Anchers