Paul Gustave Fischer (Danish, 1860-1934)

Paul Fischer studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen. His early works depicted city life and intricate relationships between its inhabitants. As he became increasingly well-travelled he painted cities in Scandinavia, France and Italy. He exhibited his works throughout Europe; notably in the Paris Salon during one of his visits in 1890. Throughout the following decade he studied French Impressionist styles which would influence his harnessing of light on his return to Copenhagen.
The calm beaches of Denmark captured the artist’s imagination and provided a juxtaposition to his crowded depictions of Copenhagen and the merriments of metropolitan city life (see lot 27). Indeed, the beach was becoming a more popular place for Danish artists to depict. Michael Ancher and his wife, Skagan native, Anna Brøndum settled together in Skagan in the 1880’s. The successful Brøndrums Hotel was owned by Anna’s father and accommodated a rise in tourism in the area. In the summer of 1890 the first railway to Skagen opened, and by 1905 a second bathing hotel opened there. An artist’s colony at Skagen, which included P.S. Krøyer, would paint tourists on the shoreline as the beach transformed ‘from a site of labour to one of leisure and sybaritic pleasures’ (P. Bergman, In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century, London, 2007, p. 177).