The Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933) is one of Scandinavia’s most important painters of the late 19th- and early 20th century. He excelled at combining realism and symbolism in an unparalleled way, often depicting scenes drawn from life and nature which, when viewed symbolically, appear to contain deeper layers of meaning.
Ring abjured “trowelling it on”: he never attempted blatantly to depict direct symbols or references to another world. His was an understated and coolly distanced way of observing.
Our painting is a seascape, with most of the canvas taken up with clumps of grass and rock, which obscure the sea, merely reduced to a small, blue sliver. A brown thistle emanates into view very prominently. It is undated, and the exact location is unknown. Ring would regularly holiday at the seaside of Sealand, eastern Denmark, most summers, and most of his seascapes and beach scenes were made between 1909-1911 during these annual breaks [1]. Our painting was probably made around this time too.
The artist has applied the paint in a very light way, giving it the frail, slight feel reminiscent of a melancholy experience. In the far distance, two boats can just about be made out. Other than that all is at peace. What is interesting is the linear perspective that Ring has created, with the canvas being bifurcated into two triangles. One of the triangles is blue (the sea), with the vantage point of the viewer lying behind the green vegetation.
By juxtaposing the thistle and the grassy dune, Ring cuts off the viewer’s line of vision. Over and beyond, where the calm waves of the sea begin, the perspective is stretched into the far distance. The beach paintings form an important stage of development in the artist’s oeuvre, paving the way for his later work, in which individuals caught in disconsolate surroundings often took centre stage.
L.A. Ring was born in 1854. He attended the Copenhagen Royal Academy of Arts in the 1870s and first showed at the prestigious Charlottenborg exhibition in 1882. His subsequent travels to France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the late 1880s allowed him to become more acquainted with French realism and the works of Millet, Bastien-Lepage and Raffaëlli.
After his death in 1933, Ring was quietly forgotten for a while. But in recent years, interest in his impressive and singular art has experienced a reawakening. Ring was, for obvious reasons, always well represented in the leading museums of Scandinavia. But latterly public institutions in the UK (The National Gallery, London) and the USA (Toledo Museum of Art) have enriched their collections with work by the artist.
_________________
1. See Henrik Wivel, Det glasklare hjerte. En biografi om L.A. Ring, Copenhagen 2020, which devotes an entire chapter to Ring's beach paintings ("Kystebilleder", pp. 226-235).
Ring abjured “trowelling it on”: he never attempted blatantly to depict direct symbols or references to another world. His was an understated and coolly distanced way of observing.
Our painting is a seascape, with most of the canvas taken up with clumps of grass and rock, which obscure the sea, merely reduced to a small, blue sliver. A brown thistle emanates into view very prominently. It is undated, and the exact location is unknown. Ring would regularly holiday at the seaside of Sealand, eastern Denmark, most summers, and most of his seascapes and beach scenes were made between 1909-1911 during these annual breaks [1]. Our painting was probably made around this time too.
The artist has applied the paint in a very light way, giving it the frail, slight feel reminiscent of a melancholy experience. In the far distance, two boats can just about be made out. Other than that all is at peace. What is interesting is the linear perspective that Ring has created, with the canvas being bifurcated into two triangles. One of the triangles is blue (the sea), with the vantage point of the viewer lying behind the green vegetation.
By juxtaposing the thistle and the grassy dune, Ring cuts off the viewer’s line of vision. Over and beyond, where the calm waves of the sea begin, the perspective is stretched into the far distance. The beach paintings form an important stage of development in the artist’s oeuvre, paving the way for his later work, in which individuals caught in disconsolate surroundings often took centre stage.
L.A. Ring was born in 1854. He attended the Copenhagen Royal Academy of Arts in the 1870s and first showed at the prestigious Charlottenborg exhibition in 1882. His subsequent travels to France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the late 1880s allowed him to become more acquainted with French realism and the works of Millet, Bastien-Lepage and Raffaëlli.
After his death in 1933, Ring was quietly forgotten for a while. But in recent years, interest in his impressive and singular art has experienced a reawakening. Ring was, for obvious reasons, always well represented in the leading museums of Scandinavia. But latterly public institutions in the UK (The National Gallery, London) and the USA (Toledo Museum of Art) have enriched their collections with work by the artist.
_________________
1. See Henrik Wivel, Det glasklare hjerte. En biografi om L.A. Ring, Copenhagen 2020, which devotes an entire chapter to Ring's beach paintings ("Kystebilleder", pp. 226-235).
View from a beach, c. 1910
Signed lower left: "L.A. Ring"
Oil on canvas
47 x 70 cm
Provenance
Private collection, Netherlands
The Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933) is one of Scandinavia’s most important painters of the late 19th- and early 20th century. He excelled at combining realism and symbolism in an unparalleled way, often depicting scenes drawn from life and nature which, when viewed symbolically, appear to contain deeper layers of meaning.
Ring abjured “trowelling it on”: he never attempted blatantly to depict direct symbols or references to another world. His was an understated and coolly distanced way of observing.
Our painting is a seascape, with most of the canvas taken up with clumps of grass and rock, which obscure the sea, merely reduced to a small, blue sliver. A brown thistle emanates into view very prominently. It is undated, and the exact location is unknown. Ring would regularly holiday at the seaside of Sealand, eastern Denmark, most summers, and most of his seascapes and beach scenes were made between 1909-1911 during these annual breaks [1]. Our painting was probably made around this time too.
The artist has applied the paint in a very light way, giving it the frail, slight feel reminiscent of a melancholy experience. In the far distance, two boats can just about be made out. Other than that all is at peace. What is interesting is the linear perspective that Ring has created, with the canvas being bifurcated into two triangles. One of the triangles is blue (the sea), with the vantage point of the viewer lying behind the green vegetation.
By juxtaposing the thistle and the grassy dune, Ring cuts off the viewer’s line of vision. Over and beyond, where the calm waves of the sea begin, the perspective is stretched into the far distance. The beach paintings form an important stage of development in the artist’s oeuvre, paving the way for his later work, in which individuals caught in disconsolate surroundings often took centre stage.
L.A. Ring was born in 1854. He attended the Copenhagen Royal Academy of Arts in the 1870s and first showed at the prestigious Charlottenborg exhibition in 1882. His subsequent travels to France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the late 1880s allowed him to become more acquainted with French realism and the works of Millet, Bastien-Lepage and Raffaëlli.
After his death in 1933, Ring was quietly forgotten for a while. But in recent years, interest in his impressive and singular art has experienced a reawakening. Ring was, for obvious reasons, always well represented in the leading museums of Scandinavia. But latterly public institutions in the UK (The National Gallery, London) and the USA (Toledo Museum of Art) have enriched their collections with work by the artist.
_________________
1. See Henrik Wivel, Det glasklare hjerte. En biografi om L.A. Ring, Copenhagen 2020, which devotes an entire chapter to Ring's beach paintings ("Kystebilleder", pp. 226-235).
Ring abjured “trowelling it on”: he never attempted blatantly to depict direct symbols or references to another world. His was an understated and coolly distanced way of observing.
Our painting is a seascape, with most of the canvas taken up with clumps of grass and rock, which obscure the sea, merely reduced to a small, blue sliver. A brown thistle emanates into view very prominently. It is undated, and the exact location is unknown. Ring would regularly holiday at the seaside of Sealand, eastern Denmark, most summers, and most of his seascapes and beach scenes were made between 1909-1911 during these annual breaks [1]. Our painting was probably made around this time too.
The artist has applied the paint in a very light way, giving it the frail, slight feel reminiscent of a melancholy experience. In the far distance, two boats can just about be made out. Other than that all is at peace. What is interesting is the linear perspective that Ring has created, with the canvas being bifurcated into two triangles. One of the triangles is blue (the sea), with the vantage point of the viewer lying behind the green vegetation.
By juxtaposing the thistle and the grassy dune, Ring cuts off the viewer’s line of vision. Over and beyond, where the calm waves of the sea begin, the perspective is stretched into the far distance. The beach paintings form an important stage of development in the artist’s oeuvre, paving the way for his later work, in which individuals caught in disconsolate surroundings often took centre stage.
L.A. Ring was born in 1854. He attended the Copenhagen Royal Academy of Arts in the 1870s and first showed at the prestigious Charlottenborg exhibition in 1882. His subsequent travels to France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the late 1880s allowed him to become more acquainted with French realism and the works of Millet, Bastien-Lepage and Raffaëlli.
After his death in 1933, Ring was quietly forgotten for a while. But in recent years, interest in his impressive and singular art has experienced a reawakening. Ring was, for obvious reasons, always well represented in the leading museums of Scandinavia. But latterly public institutions in the UK (The National Gallery, London) and the USA (Toledo Museum of Art) have enriched their collections with work by the artist.
_________________
1. See Henrik Wivel, Det glasklare hjerte. En biografi om L.A. Ring, Copenhagen 2020, which devotes an entire chapter to Ring's beach paintings ("Kystebilleder", pp. 226-235).
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