After Sunset
L.A. Ring (Danish, 1854–1933)
1899
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 158 cm, width 235 cm, height 181.2 , width 258.5
- Culture
- Danish
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
Night is falling on this scene, which shows a church and tall pine trees. If you simply look at the landscape in the painting it seems to be a naturalistic depiction of a time of day when nature takes on a new tint from the last light of the day. However, skeletons emerge underneath the churchyard wall, and the landscape is not just an outer phenomenon; it also represents our own nature, passions, and fears. Pure landscape painting was the province of those with conservative and right-wing leanings. L.A. Ring, whose political favours ran to the left, takes up a position poised right between two art movements: Realism, which wished to create art that showed spectators something about the real lives of ordinary people, fraught with illness, poverty, and suffering: and Symbolism, which took reality as a point of departure that could be transformed or manipulated in a purely subjective manner. Here, landscape painting occupies a station somewhere between the outer and inner world.
