At the French Windows. The Artist's Wife

There is always more at stake than what meets the eye in an L. A. Ring painting. One example is this portrait of his young wife, which is among the ten main highlights at SMK – owner of Denmark’s largest and best collection of this Danish artist’s work.

The Artist’s Wife certainly deserves its place among SMK’s ten greatest highlights. Ring first attracted SMK’s attention around 1900, and that attention has remained unwavering through a succession of directors and curators at the museum. They have expanded the collection of Ring’s art to the point where it comprises 32 paintings and 33 drawings in 2019.

The work possesses the duality typical of L. A. Ring while also reflecting the transition between the old Denmark, as it is perceived in Danish Golden Age art, and the modern world that is such a key theme for L. A. Ring. At the same time, the painting shows how portraits of women (and wives) change around 1900, becoming more nuanced. Women are allowed to appear more self-sufficient, to display greater personality and appear much more independent.

‘This is one of my favourite pictures – for many reasons. It is painted with great skill and has a very crisp and delicate colour scheme. And just looking at it makes you happy. This is precisely the kind of summer we all dream of, with a lush garden and a beautiful woman too. Remember, this is the woman he has just married, so he is obviously interested in depicting her as part of a world he sees as happy. A very positive picture,’ says chief curator and senior researcher Peter Nørgaard Larsen.

The transience of life
But there is also something else at stake in the painting. As a Symbolist, Ring looks to the soul and to inner life, distancing himself from the more carefree landscape paintings created by Danish Golden Age artists. Before marrying the 22-year-old Sigrid Kähler in 1896, the 42-year-old artist had suffered from several bouts of depression.

‘You think you see one thing, but there’s usually something else going on too. There is always something disturbing the idyll and harmony, and that’s what makes him really interesting,’ says Peter Nørgaard Larsen.

The disruptive element in The Artist's Wife is the old tree with the gnarled branches: its skeletal structure adds a discordant note to the idyll, reminding us of life’s impermanence and prompting thoughts of death. As if the artist felt a constant need to balance things out.

‘I think of his art as liminal images, pictures that are poised on a threshold – partly because they stand on the threshold between the old and the new worlds, but also due to their subject matter, which is often about moving from one stage or place to another – old people waiting to die or young people waiting to enter adult life.’

Always in transit
The threshold motif is not just a reference to personal development. It is also about existential deliberations in an age when the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has declared God dead, and man is left to his own devices, his own destiny.

In this regard, L. A. Ring stands among the artists who most poignantly describe the major upheavals that occur in Danish society around 1900, a time when Denmark is undergoing major transformations and people move from the countryside to the cities.

‘For Ring, it’s about handling the various challenges you come across in life, and depictions of that kind are relevant for anyone with any kind of empathy and sensibility. That’s precisely what art can do. We all live in a time of great upheaval, and in some sense we are always in transit, moving between something old and something new. That’s what L. A. Ring’s art is about.’