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| Midsummer's Eve Bonfire on the Beach at Skagen,1906,150x257 cm |
Whenever I hear the “Swedish Rhapsody” played on WQXR, New
York City’s classical music station, I am reminded that
Hugo Alfven, the composer, stole the most beautiful painter’s wife who ever
lived away from Peder Severin Kroyer, one of the finest painters who ever
lived. God knows it is hard enough for great
painters to find true romance, since most of their time is spent painting
pictures, talking about art and planning their next masterpiece. So it seems,
from my distant vantage point, that Alfven committed one of the most despicable
acts imaginable.
But Kroyer was first and foremost a painter. He tore this painful story from his heart and
set it down on canvas. The result was a
masterpiece of personal narrative that is unrivaled in the history of art. One critic likened it to a “theatrical
ensemble…with all the requisites for an Ibsen or Strindberg psychological drama.” I’ll endeavor to explain.
Kroyer was born in Stavanger,
Norway in 1851, but
raised in Copenhagen by an uncle’s
family because his unwed mother was declared mentally unfit to raise him. He started his art studies at age 9 and
developed into a remarkable painter with a prodigious talent, a bon vivant
nature and, it seems, a sturdy ego. He once
said that he was the fastest painter around, only Zorn was faster. The plein air paintings of the two
Scandinavians made a deep impression on the Spaniard Sorolla, another master of
bravura painting.
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| Himself in 1897 |
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| Summer Evening with Marie on the Beach at Skagen, 1899 |
Kroyer’s most famous paintings were created in Skagen, a
remote Danish fishing village and one of the enchanted art colonies that arose
in Europe in the 19th Century. He first
visited Skagen in 1882, and right away alienated Michael Ancher, the resident
painter who had invited him there, because he painted a scene or two that
Ancher considered his territory. Their differences were soon sorted out, and
for several years, this colony of artists and poets was one big happy
family. The paintings of Ancher and his equally
talented wife, Anna. were good, solidly painted works. Kroyer’s were brilliant. Kroyer remained a traveling, cosmopolitan
artist of great reputation, but spent his summers in Skagen.
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| Marie in 1890 |
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| Marie in 1891 |
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| Her's and His Portraits on a 5 7/8 x 7 1/2" canvas,1898 |
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| In 1892 |
In Paris in 1888,
Kroyer fell in love with the beautiful Marie Triepcke, 16 years his junior, an
art student he had briefly instructed a few years earlier in Copenhagen. They married at her parents’ home in Germany
on July 23, 1889 after a
whirlwind romance. She was his “great
love” and the inspiration for some of his most famous paintings. They had one child, Vibeke, born in January
1895. But the marriage soured due to Kroyer’s growing manic depression, believed to have been inherited from his
mother. Much more seriously, Kroyer had
been diagnosed with syphilis in 1886, a killer disease in the 19th Century
that eventually led to his dementia, total blindness and early death in Skagen
at the age of 58 in 1909.
In 1902, Marie met Alfven, a notorious womanizer, who became
enamored with her after seeing one of the many pictures Kroyer had painted of
his beloved muse. Marie was exhausted from dealing with Kroyer’s
mood swings and thus was susceptible to Alfven’s practiced advances. In 1905, Marie won the divorce that Kroyer had
bitterly contested. She had written her
lawyer that her relationship with Kroyer had become “a living hell…all humanity
and compassion has been ripped out of him.” Years later, Marie, who died at the age of 73
in 1940, reportedly recanted, asking herself how she could have left that “good,
kind-hearted, loveable man.” Marie had
been sharply criticized for deserting Vibeke, who stayed with Kroyer while she
ran off with Alfven. Marie gave birth to
a second daughter in 1906 and eventually married Alfven in 1912.
Kroyer had tried desperately to hold on to Marie. When Alfven arrived on the scene, this highly regarded painter was an emotional
train wreck about to happen, already suffering from dementia and only a few
years away from his horrible death. Painting was his only salvation, so of course he got right to it. First he did a preparatory oil sketch in 1903,
one year after Alfven’s appearance. Then
he stretched a 5 by 8 foot canvas and, in 1906, one year after the divorce,
unveiled his huge masterpiece showing a great crowd of the artistic and influential
Skagen community gathered around a large bonfire. The painting, “Midsummer’s Eve Bonfire on the
Beach at Skagen,” is now in the collection of the Skagens
Museum, as are many other Kroyer paintings.
Most of the more than 40 figures in the painting are
identifiable from numerous preparatory drawings, pastels and oil sketches
Kroyer made for his marvelous and seemingly innocent depiction of the nocturnal celebration of the summer
solstice. But Kroyer has placed Vibeke, his fragile 11-year-old daughter, standing in the extreme lower left hand
corner of the picture, dressed in a white summer frock, her hair neatly
braided. Vibeke's rapt gaze is focused on the bonfire, but she must also see to the left of the bonfire
a man and woman standing together in the background, leaning against a boat, their eyes cast downward
in stark contrast to the animated mood of revelry depicted throughout the
scene. The man, his hands in his
pockets, is Hugo Alfven. The woman is Marie Triebcke Kroyer, the mother who had abandoned her
to the care of the doomed father.
