A painting by L.A. Ring to be sold at online auction

Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933) was born in the country and grew up under humble circumstances – a childhood and adolescence that served as a source of inspiration all through his life. Not only did L.A. Ring name himself after his native town, he also proudly identified with the poverty he knew in his early years and made it a pronounced element of the visual universe of his art. Thus, the Danish landscape and the Danish rural population became a crucial theme in L.A. Ring's art.

L.A. Ring was given to depression, and his paintings could be characterised as social realism without idyll. Nevertheless, his art is not restricted to negative associations of poverty. On the contrary, the beholder is offered several positive leads and possibilities of interpretation. L.A. Ring's interiors depict the simplicity of rural housing and, correspondingly, the simplicity of rural life.

This is also evident in "A Peasant Woman Mending Stockings", a perfect example of L.A. Ring's masterly ambiguity: The painting positively exudes stillness and is literally a picture of the moment, almost even in medias res. At the same time, however, the motif also contains a certain dynamics by way of the window that symbolises the outside world, passing by this poor woman's humble residence. Likewise, the sharp features of the woman's face express more than merely her concentration on the task at hand; they are also emblematic of her existence as such.

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