On September 24, 2026, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm opens an exhibition that should interest anyone who has ever chosen a poster featuring the sea. "To the Sea!" brings together around 200 works - paintings, photographs, advertising posters and historical swimsuits - around a single idea: that the beach is a borderland. The exhibition runs until February 7, 2027, right through the Swedish winter, which is an elegant touch in itself. We come in from the slush on Blasieholmen and encounter Monet’s Trouville in brilliant sunshine.
Quick facts: "To the Sea! The Beach as Borderland and Summer Dream" is on view at the Nationalmuseum from September 24, 2026, to February 7, 2027, and includes around 200 works. Loans include works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery in London. The exhibition is part of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond initiative RJ Art and Culture.
The railway created the beach scene - not the artists
The exhibition’s first section is about something rarely mentioned when we admire the Impressionists’ coastal scenes: they would never have been painted without train service. In the second half of the 19th century, seaside resorts sprang up along the coasts, and in France it was Normandy that grew fastest. New railway lines made the beaches accessible within a day’s journey from Paris, and it became fashionable to swim in the sea, spend time on the beach and stay in newly built hotels.
Claude Monet and Édouard Manet joined in. Monet’s "Regatta at Sainte-Adresse" from 1867 and "The Beach at Trouville" from 1870 are both in the exhibition, as is Gustave Caillebotte’s "Trouville, the Beach and the Villas" from 1882, from the Nationalmuseum’s own collection. It’s no coincidence that Monet’s "Arrival of the Normandy Train at Gare Saint-Lazare" from 1877 hangs in the same exhibition. The train and the beach are part of the same story.
This is worth bearing in mind when choosing art. The beach scene is not a timeless romantic idea but a fairly precisely dated invention, born of the leisure time brought about by industrialization. When you hang a sea poster in your hallway, you’re hanging up the new class mobility of the 19th century.
You can also see it in what the artists chose to paint. Early coastal scenes from Normandy are strikingly often populated by well-dressed bathers in beach chairs rather than by the sea itself. Only later, once bathing had become commonplace, did artists dare to empty the scenes of people and turn them into pure studies of light and water. So anyone looking for a tranquil horizon painting is actually looking for a fairly recent invention.
"The beach became a subject the moment it became accessible. Art followed the railway, not the other way around."
Skagen: two lives on the same stretch of sand
The exhibition’s second section is about Skagen, where an artists’ colony was established in the 1880s and the long sandy beaches soon became popular bathing spots. Here, the National Museum does something more interesting than simply showing beautiful light-filled paintings. It juxtaposes images of vacation life with those of the fishing community, making the meeting between modern bathing culture and the local population’s circumstances a recurring theme.
Peder Severin Krøyer’s “Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer on the Beach at Skagen” from 1893 is included, as is Michael Ancher’s “A Stroll on the Beach” from 1896. Both show artists strolling in the twilight. A few meters away in the exhibition are images of work that was hard and life-threatening. It’s a reminder that the blue hour on a beach can mean rest for one person and waiting for another, and anyone who delves into Krøyer’s Skagen and the Blue Hour will quickly see how deliberate this double vision was, even among the artists themselves.
The decade of nude bathing and Nordic worship of light
The third section explores something that is easy to miss in art history: during the first decade of the 20th century, interest in depicting the naked male body grew in the Nordic countries. The sports movement was gaining ground, the strong, fit man became an ideal, and sea bathing was considered invigorating and healthy.
The result was some of the most striking and luminous canvases in Nordic art history. J.A.G. Acke’s “Östrasalt” from 1906, Eugène Jansson’s “The Navy Bathhouse” from 1907, from the Thiel Gallery, and Edvard Munch’s “Bathing Boys” from 1897–99, from the Munch Museum, hang together in the exhibition. Anders Zorn’s “Outdoors” from 1890, on loan from the Ateneum in Helsinki, belongs to the same movement.
For anyone collecting art at home, this is a rewarding avenue to explore, because the subjects embody a completely different world of light from the French coast. Where Monet works with haze, Jansson uses a deep blue that almost vibrates. If you want the Nordic version on your wall, look among the Swedish artworks, not the French ones.
The difference can be described technically. French coastal Impressionism uses broken color and high brightness, creating scenes that blend into light-colored walls and feel calm from a distance. Nordic bathing paintings from the same decades use saturated, almost monochromatic blue and strong contrasts between body and water. These are images that need a wall to themselves and become dull in a crowded grouping. Hang a Jansson-inspired composition among four other subjects and it loses exactly what makes it worth looking at.
From Coney Island to the Surrealists' threshold
The exhibition's final section follows the beach motif into the 20th century, and here things get messier in the best way. American painters depicted crowded beaches outside New York - Harry Roseland's "Coney Island" from 1933 is included, as is press photographer Weegee's "During The War" from around 1944. At the same time, artists on Sweden's west coast transformed beach scenes into colorful images of energy and joie de vivre. Sigrid Hjertén's "Figures on a Beach" from 1917, from the Gothenburg Museum of Art, belongs here.
And then there are the Surrealists, who did something entirely different. For them, the beach was not a place but a threshold: the transition between waking and dreaming, between the conscious and the unconscious. That reading makes the exhibition's subtitle clear. The beach as a borderland is not poetic embellishment but the exhibition's thesis.
That breadth is unusual. Most exhibitions about a subject follow a line through art history. This one instead follows a social change, which is why Weegee's flash-lit press photograph from the war years can appear in the same story as an Impressionist parasol scene from the 1870s. Both are about who gets a place on the beach.
The loans that make the exhibition hard to repeat
In addition to the museum's own collections, the exhibition includes loans from institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery in London. This says something about the exhibition's importance, but also something practical: works of this stature rarely travel, and when they do, it's for a season. Monet's "The Beach at Trouville" comes from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, Zorn's "Outdoors" from the Ateneum in Helsinki, Munch's bathing boys from the Munch Museum in Oslo, and Roseland's "Coney Island" from the Terra Foundation.
For a Swedish visitor, that means four months in Stockholm take the place of a trip around the world that would, in practice, take several years. This is also why the exhibition catalog is worth the price for anyone who collects art at home: this is probably the only time this particular constellation of works can be studied side by side.
The fact that the advertising posters are displayed alongside the paintings is also a deliberate statement. Posters from turn-of-the-century seaside resorts are now among the most sought-after subjects in retro and vintage posters, and they are directly related to the paintings hanging beside them. The same coast, the same sun, a different purpose.
Tip: Consider going in November or January instead of during the first few weeks. The exhibition is on through February 7, 2027, and the contrast between the darkness outside and the summer light on the canvas is the whole point. Bring your phone and photograph the color combinations that catch your eye – they’re a better starting point for choosing art for your home than any paint swatch card.
What the exhibition teaches you about choosing seascapes for your home
The most useful thing about “To the Sea!” is that it shows how many different things a seascape can actually do in a room. We often talk about seascapes as a single category, but the exhibition divides them into at least four types.
The first is the horizon image, where the sea is a calm line and almost nothing happens. This type works best in bedrooms and reading nooks, because the eye has a single resting point. The second is the beach scene with figures, parasols, and movement. It belongs in rooms where things are already happening, such as kitchens and dining areas, and holds up to close viewing.
The third is the light study, where the subject is really a particular time of day. This is Krøyer’s and Jansson’s territory, and these images are sensitive to the room’s lighting. Hang a blue-hour image under cool LED lighting and half the effect disappears. The fourth is the graphic coastal image, reduced to a few shapes and a line. It’s close to minimalist prints and works well in hallways and stairwells where people pass by quickly.
If you’d like to explore a broader selection, you’ll find nature prints and photographic art, where coastlines and water feature in both forms, as paintings and photographs. And if you’d like to understand why open vistas and water make us feel calm, you can explore the research on landscape preferences.
Frequently asked questions about To the Sea! at the Nationalmuseum
Anyone who leaves Blasieholmen with their head full of Trouville, Skagen and Coney Island will inevitably come home and take another look at their own wall. That’s often how choosing a good subject begins, and this time you’ll have unusually good arguments in your favor after four episodes on art and cultural history. Explore nature prints when you get home, and let the exhibition help you decide what kind of sea you really want to live with.
More about the exhibition is available from Nationalmuseum, and more about the research initiative behind it from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.