LAURITS ANDERSEN RING
(1854-1933)
THE ARTIST’S VIEW FROM HIS GARDEN IN SANKT JØRGENSBJERG
oil on canvas, 52.7 x 76.8 cm.
signed and dated lower right: L A Ring 1926
provenance:
private collection, Denmark;
Anonymous sale; Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 31 August 1999, lot 82;
acquired at the sale above by the previous owner.
exhibited:
Copenhagen, Charlottenborg, 1928, no 42.
Through dark, bare branches the viewer gets a glimpse of the village Sankt Jørgensbjerg in Denmark, where the artist lived from 1913 until the end of his life. The white, grey and black houses with their traditional triangular roofs made of wood and straw dominate the middle ground, while newer buildings with red roof tiles subtly add color to the picture’s otherwise almost monochrome appearance. The reduced palette enhances the mood of desolation transmitted by this scene devoid of human presence – no people on the streets, no lamps lighting up a window, no smoke coming out of a chimney… The viewer is left with an eerie, melancholic feeling. Ring, like his friend and colleague Vilhelm Hammershøi, was a master in creating suspenseful compositions of stillness.
In 1913, despite being one of the most successful artists in Denmark by the turn of the century, Laurits Andersen Ring chose the modest hamlet of Sankt Jørgensbjerg to build a house. Born as the son of a carpenter and a farmer’s daughter he felt more at ease in a rural environment and preferred life in a small community to living in the big city of Copenhagen. He had trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the late 1870s, but was not content with the strict academic teachings. Travels and longer sojourns abroad, including a two-year stay in Italy, and contact with the art of French realist and naturalist painters Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage provided him with important stimuli.
Already in the 1880s he got increasingly interested in the difficulties of the poor and social justice for the lower classes. His art mostly conveys themes of social realism, but is also indebted to symbolism. He frequently painted his immediate surroundings and people, addressing themes of peasant and traditional rural activities at a time when this way of life was beginning to fade away as a result of industrialization. His scenes of unembellished rural life as well as his landscapes are characterized by a melancholic nature. Ring experienced his breakthrough as an artist during the last decade of the nineteenth century. His work was exhibited internationally and gained recognition and awards. Ring was, for example, one of the Danish artists represented at the influential Scandinavian Art Exhibition in America in 1912-13.
Ring painted the present work sitting in his garden in Sankt Jørgensbjerg as can be seen when comparing it with a contemporary photograph (fig. 1). The painting features most of the characteristics that made Ring one of the most unique and successful artists in Denmark of his time: an effectively reduced color scheme, striking croppings, a very balanced relationship between foreground and background and a recognizably clear formal language. The branches of the trees in the foreground recall Japanese printmaking and emphasize the flat picture plane while at the same time increasing the contrast between foreground and background. Once he had found his signature visual language Ring did not let himself be influenced by other stylistic trends.