After Sunset

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Artist: Laurits Andersen Ring (Danish, 1854–1933)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 158 × 235 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

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.