Exhibited: Kunstforeningen, “L.A. Ring 1854–1933”, 1953 no. 96.

Provenance: Engineer Johan Petersen's collection, his estate auction Winkel & Magnussen 180, 1935 no. 105, ill. p. 30. Here acquired by the present owner's father.

Ring's wife Sigrid dies in 1923, and in his great grief Ring stops painting altogether, but resumes it again in 1924. In the present painting from 1924, he is back with full artistic strength with many of his innovative and original artistic elements present.

It is a beautiful frosty sunny day with high drifts of snow along the road. You can almost hear the snow crackling under your feet when you walk, and feel the heat from the sun's rays and see your warm breath turn into small clouds of steam. The snowy road leads us into the painting, but the eye is stopped by the trees and the house on the left and turns to the right behind another house, with a distinctive black diagonal roof and a yellow gable and green picket fence in front. Next to the house, a large white gable towers up and completely stops our further view, like a strange naked cool geometric shape. Through shifts and contrasts between the near and the far, plane and space, light and shadow and clear colours: black, white, green, blue and yellow, Ring creates his very own visual dynamics. “He does not create cubism, but looks cubistically at the reality that is in front of him and creates on the canvas something that looks like abstraction, but is not. It is reality, artistic reality, intertwined into abstraction.” (p. 249).

This is among other things how Henrik Wivel in “Det glasklare hjerte. En biograf om L. A. Ring” from 2020, describes (in Danish) Ring's relationship with Cubism, and how he was inspired by Japanese art, Cubism, and modernity in general, and how this is particularly expressed in his works from his time at Sankt Jørgensbjerg.

This can be seen very clearly in the present painting.