Peder Severin Kroyer (1851-1909) knows each child in Denmark and Norway. The Norwegian Danish painter from Skagen is the icon of Nordic impressionism.

At the age of 14 Kroyer came to the Royal Danish Academy of fine arts. As a young artist, he undertook extended trips to Spain, Italy and in particular France, where he studied the Impressionists in Paris from 1877 to 1881. In the summer of 1882, Kroyer came for the first time after Skagen, where he spent every summer from now on was the principal representative of the artist colony.

His pictures show a carefree life of artists, their festivals, walks on the beach and atmospheric evenings in the moonlight.

It is not only the technical mastery and the virtuoso handling of issues of the composition and the colour matching, the Kroyer make a great master. It is also his accurate observation and the fact that the exactly captured scenes of his paintings almost immediately affect the Viewer.

The style of Impressionism that emerged in French painting in 1870 owes its name to the Claude Monet's landscape 'Impression, Soleil Levant'. After initial refusal it began a true triumphant advance.

Such painters as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir and others created motifs from everyday life, urban and landscape scenes in a bright, natural light.

Impressionism can be seen as a reaction to the academic painting. The emphasis was not on content with its strict rules of painting structure, but on the object as it appears at any given moment, in an often random cut out. The reality was seen in its whole color variety in natural lighting. The studio painting was replaced by the open-air painting.

The brightening of the palette and the dissolution of firm contours was accompanied by a new way of handling with color. Often, the colors were no longer mixed on the palette but side by side on the canvas so that the final impression lies in the eye of the beholder with a certain distance. In "Pointillism", (with such painters as Georges Seurat or Paul Signac) this principle was carried to the extreme.

Outside France, Impressionism was taken up by such painters as Max Slevogt, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth in Germany, and by James A. M. Whistler in the United States.

In sculpture, the impressionism expressed itself only conditionally. In the works of Auguste Rodin, who is considered one of the main representatives, you can see a resolution of the surfaces in which the play of light and shadow is included in the artistic expression. Degas and Renoir created sculptures as well.