Rhododendrons in Tuxen’s Garden

I don't know if you follow, but from time to time we feature beautiful pieces created by Danish artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are taken from the collection of Skagens Museum in Skagen, Denmark. Today we present astonishing Laurits Tuxen's painting of rhododendrons. Please enjoy and follow Skagens Museum on Instagram - @skagensmuseum :)

According to Laurits Tuxen’s own memoirs, it was the Danish-born Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom, who advised him to plant rhododendrons in his garden at Villa Dagminne in Skagen, - a plant nobody had ever attempted to grow this far north in Denmark before. Over the years these rhododendron bushes became the source of several paintings with their colourful flowers as motifs. In this painting Tuxen’s wife Frederikke is positioned to the far left. She seems almost to disappear in the profusion of flowers and in purely colour terms, she is an integral part of the flowering bushes, as the violet colours of her clothes with different tones of white are repeated in the white flowers surrounding her. Tuxen applied a variety of red and purple hues as well as their complementary colours, green and yellow. In his notebooks of 1917, he notes that he started to paint the picture on 5th June and completed it 13 days later.