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Lot Essay
Born in Ring in rural Sjaelland, Denmark into a family of smallhold farmers, Laurits Andersen Ring's fascination with rural life and landscape was strengthened by his move to Copenhagen as a young man to pursue his artistic career.
After an apprenticeship as a house painter and a brief spell at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the artist returned to his parents' home where he began to develop the unique vocabulary of the landscape and genre scenes that would come to dominate his oeuvre. At once timeless and historic, they capture traditional Denmark at the moment of crossing the threshold of modern life. Telephone poles and rail tracks wire through his white-chalked villages and cornfields as early harbingers of the ongoing and irreversible process of industrialization. Together with his refined figure studies, Ring’s work is at once symbolist and realist, vernacular and universal, and justly recognized as a hallmark of late nineteenth century painting in Northern Europe.
The location of Waiting for the train is Roskilde Ladevej, Baldersbronde - about 25 km outside Copenhagen. The Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon mentions a painting by L.A. Ring, Naar Toget ventes, dated 1913. A similar painting bearing the same title and interest in social realism was painted a year later representing a man and his bicycle waiting (142 x 174 cm). It is in the collection of the State Ministery (Henrik Wivel L.A. Ring, Copenhagen, 1997, p. 56, fig. 34, illustrated).
After an apprenticeship as a house painter and a brief spell at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the artist returned to his parents' home where he began to develop the unique vocabulary of the landscape and genre scenes that would come to dominate his oeuvre. At once timeless and historic, they capture traditional Denmark at the moment of crossing the threshold of modern life. Telephone poles and rail tracks wire through his white-chalked villages and cornfields as early harbingers of the ongoing and irreversible process of industrialization. Together with his refined figure studies, Ring’s work is at once symbolist and realist, vernacular and universal, and justly recognized as a hallmark of late nineteenth century painting in Northern Europe.
The location of Waiting for the train is Roskilde Ladevej, Baldersbronde - about 25 km outside Copenhagen. The Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon mentions a painting by L.A. Ring, Naar Toget ventes, dated 1913. A similar painting bearing the same title and interest in social realism was painted a year later representing a man and his bicycle waiting (142 x 174 cm). It is in the collection of the State Ministery (Henrik Wivel L.A. Ring, Copenhagen, 1997, p. 56, fig. 34, illustrated).