Laurits Andersen Ring - Harvest [1885]

Laurits Andersen Ring - Harvest [1885], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The labourer is the brother of Ring (1854 - 1933), Ole Peter Andersen, and the picture was painted at his farm in Tehusene at Fakse on South Zealand. Many of Ring’s works depict common people in everyday situations, often scenes from those Zealand village communities that he was so closely linked to through his childhood and subsequent homes in adulthood.

It is a monumental portrait, not of the brother, whose face is virtually hidden, but of the agricultural labourer as a type, as a powerful bearer of Ring’s hopes of revolution. It is also, however, a picture of the Reaper mowing down the cornfields, thereby presenting an image of man’s position suspended between life, the ripe cornfield, and inevitable death. The extremely high horizon is very typical of Ring’s works. Here it serves to prevent the reaper from reaching up into the sky, keeping him firmly grounded.

Laurits Andersen Ring - The Artist’s Wife [1897]

Laurits Andersen Ring - The Artist’s Wife [1897], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Ring (1854 - 1933) was married in 1896, the year before he painted this portrait of his wife, Sigrid Kähler (1874-1923). At that time he was 42, while she was 22. Thus, it seems natural to join several other art historians in interpreting this image as a declaration of love for the artist’s pregnant wife, with the promise of spring acting as a symbol of the consummation of love. 

With so much new-found happiness, hope, and flowering plants gathered in one place it seems as though the awareness of the opposite of life, death, becomes the underlying theme or perhaps the experience that Ring attempts to handle or exorcise with his painting. An experience that Ring, an atheist, expressed in many works. Here, he addresses the theme by contrasting Sigrid’s belly against stunted, gnarly branches. A reminder of the fragility that also encompasses the budding life sensed in both man and nature.