Provenance: Frederikke Treschow (1856–1946), married 1901 to Lauritz Tuxen (1853–1946). Krøyer also painted a portrait of Frederikke Treschow in 1883. That one H. Chr. Christensen's Catalogue Raisonné of the works of P.S. Krøyer, 1923, no. 289. Today at Skagen's Art Museums (Inv. no. 1244).

Moonlight was a recurring motif in Krøyer’s art, and in the exhibition catalogue “The Blue Hour of Peder Severin Krøyer” (Musée Marmottan Monet in 2021), his relationship to the motif is described as follows: “There can be no doubt that the moon constituted a typical landscape study for Krøyer in his late years. At the end of the 1960s, his daughter, Vibeke Krøyer, took steps to get the first biography of Krøyer under way, written and published by the journalist and painter Ernst Mentze in 1969. She gave an interview on this occasion, recalling this anecdote from the late summer of 1906, when she was aged eleven: ‘We sometimes cycled along the southern beach when the sand was hard enough. Father felt drawn to the sea. During a stay in the mountains of Tyrol, I remember him being surprised that people could live this far away from the sea, which is salty like human tears. – The sea beneath the light of the moon probably presented the strongest urge. Father was moonstruck. He had to get out there–.[…]’” (Mette Harbo Lehmann in “The Blue Hour of Peder Severin Krøyer”, Musée Marmottan Monet, 2021, p. 210).

In the present painting, Krøyer has not included the light source itself, the moon, but focused on the shimmering reflection in the water's surface, which is further emphasized with pasty brushstrokes.