Jens Søndergaard's Museum

Jens Søndergaard was a Danish Expressionist painter who trained for a time at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, traveled in Paris and Italy, and became a member of the Grønningen group of artists that also included Johannes Larsen (1867-1961) and William Scharff (1886-1959). Søndergaard's paintings drew deeply on nature and the natural world, particularly on the lines of the Danish cliffs and the North Sea - indeed, the art historian Leo Swane considered that Søndergaard was to the Danish landscape what Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was to the Norwegian.

Søndergaard bought this wooden house as a summer residence in 1928, and returned here almost every summer until his death. Perching on the edge of a cliff, in the small village of Ferring, it looks out to the North Sea, and commands views of the lighthouse Bovbjerg Fyr as well as the dramatic cliffs that surround it. Søndergaard bequeathed the house and collection to the Danish state in 1952 and it opened to the public a year after his death, in 1958. Today the museum displays a selection of his paintings in the environment that originally inspired them.