Exhibited: Kunstforeningen, Christian Clausen exhibiton, January-February 1902.

The winter of 1886 was a difficult time for L.A. Ring; his brother Ole Peter died suddenly at the age of 36, and after the death of his father a few years earlier in 1883, Ring was the sole provider for his mother, who had moved back to his hometown. Growing up in a poor village in the South of Zealand, Ring had been close to the difficult conditions of working-class life. The private situation and the tense political situation of the time with threatening strikes made Ring consider emigrating to America. However, he stayed in Denmark, and in the spring of the same year he rented a studio in Knabrostræde in Copenhagen, where he met the painter Christian Clausen.

Clausen taught in Studentersamfundet, which worked to unite the workers of the city and the country in a revolt against the right-wing government. A political agenda that Ring - who, growing up in the countryside, had witnessed how a large part of the rural population had to live in poverty - was very committed to. Clausen introduced Ring to a circle of artists and art enthusiasts, journalists and intellectuals from the literary left-wing, who shared Ring's thoughts. In 1887, Ring and Clausen shared a studio in Oehlenschlægersgade, and together they moved in the free-spirited environment around Café Bernina, Studentersamfundet and Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler and the editorial offices of Politiken, Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende and the newspaper København - a newspaper that was founded in 1890, where both Clausen and Ring were on the editorial team.

The friendship between Clausen and Ring had a great impact on Ring's formative years, and according to H. Chr. Christensen's Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of L.A. Ring (1910), Ring also portrayed Clausen in 1887. It is therefore reasonable to believe that the present portrait is also from the late 1880s. Ring's friendship with Clausen influenced him both politically and artistically, where Ring's perception of social conditions also manifested itself in his depictions of everyday life among workers and the rural population.

FOTO AF L. A. RING MED I KATALOG?