She is remembered principally as the wife of Peder Severin Krøyer, one of the most successful members of the artists' colony known as the Skagen Painters, which flourished at the end of the 19th century in the far north of Jutland.

Married life became more difficult as Krøyer experienced periods of mental illness from 1900, and Marie eventually began an affair with the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén who had also been taken by her beauty.

Born in Frederiksberg, Marie was the daughter of Max Triepcke, the technical director at the J. H. Rubens Loomery, and his wife Minna Augusta Kindler, who had emigrated to Denmark from Germany in 1866.

Heinrich Hirschsprung, a prominent businessman who ran a successful tobacco manufacturing business, was a patron of the arts and had shown an early interest in P. S.

She studied privately under Carl Thomsen in the 1880s and was helped along the way by Bertha Wegmann, a leading portrait artist of the day, for whom she modeled at sixteen years of age.

[3] As there were no public schools for female artists, Marie had the idea of saving on the expense of private tuition by gathering a group of other young aspiring women, renting a studio, and asking the best art teachers to come and give them occasional tips.

Marie Krøyer also studied in the ateliers of Gustave Courtois and Alfred Philippe Roll, discovering Impressionism and Naturalism, which would strongly influence her own style of painting.

Other friends with whom she maintained exhaustive correspondence include Georg Brandes, critic and scholar, whom she admired, and the poet Sophus Schandorf and his wife, who treated Marie like a daughter.

"[10][11] By contrast, her friend Anna Ancher enjoyed a more positive relationship with her own husband; she was not concerned by domestic duties, and their artistic styles and motifs were so different that direct comparison was never a problem.

The paintings left by Vibeke, now in Skagens Museum, showed her mother was a fine painter who had possessed the unrealized potential to become one of Skagen's leading artists[10] This was further evidenced in 2002, in connection with the publication of Tonni Arnold's book Kunsten i Marie Krøyers liv (Art in Marie Krøyer's Life), when an exhibition of some of her hitherto unknown works, 40 paintings and 20 sketches, was held in Copenhagen's Kunstforeningen after the author had tracked them down in Sweden.

When she and her husband moved into the town clerk's house in Skagen Vesterby in 1895, she designed the furniture and the interiors,[6] as she did when they acquired their Copenhagen home in Bergensgade.

As she subscribed to the journal The Studio, she could also follow developments by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who were members of the Arts and Crafts movement.

[3] Her interests extended to fireplaces, woven fabrics, kitchen fittings and wall panels, inspiring the Skagen architect Ulrik Plesner to take account of her plans in his own work.

[3] In 1905, after Krøyer had finally given her a divorce, she moved to Dalarna in Sweden where Alfvén had bought a large piece of land beside Lake Siljan.

Marie planned their new home, Alfvénsgaard, combining local Swedish building traditions with interiors in the Art Nouveau style while taking account of Danish craftsmanship.

[6] Shortly after arriving in Paris in December 1888, Marie ran into Krøyer at the Café de la Régence, a favorite with the many Danish artists living in the city at the end of the 1880s.

She waved at Krøyer, who was walking past, recognizing him from his occasional visits to the ladies' classes in Copenhagen and from the sittings when she modeled for the painting A Duet (1887).

They spent their honeymoon in Stenbjerg, a fishing village in the northwest of Jutland on the former island of Thy, avoiding the attention of the artists in Skagen.

[13] While Vibeke was still a small child, Krøyer's health started to deteriorate with bouts of mental illness, making the marriage increasingly difficult.

Marie Krøyer's masterpiece, especially as she also created the furniture and interiors, and she designed a number of beautiful little buildings in the local style around the estate.