# After Sunset

- By: L.A. Ring (Danish, 1854–1933)
- Date: 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](https://open.smk.dk/artwork/image/KMS8484)
- Rights: [Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/)
- Picture: https://iip-thumb.smk.dk/iiif/jp2/pv63g3374_KMS8484.tif.reconstructed.tif.jp2/full/!1920,1080/0/default.jpg
- Who can see it: Little Ones profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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.