I teglværket (At the Brickyard)

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.
From 1890-92, when his friend and fellow artist H. A. Brendekilde set off for Europe and the Middle East, Laurits Andersen Ring instead focused his attention locally, traveling widely through his home country to execute a remarkable series of paintings depicting skilled craftsmen in their workplaces. Painted in 1892, toward the end of this series, I teglværket (At the Brickyard) was probably painted on the island of Fyn, just to the east of Jutland, Denmark’s mainland. Another work depicting brickmakers, Brickmakers. Ladby Brickworks (Vejen Kunstmuseum, Denmark) was also executed this same year. Perhaps among his most Realist compositions, the works from this series remain a compelling record of the changing nature of life and work at the end of the 19^th century.
Brickmaking in the late 19^th century was a process so far little changed by industrialization, and was backbreaking, difficult labor. Brickmakers. Ladby Brickworks depicts the first stages of the process, with horses in the background mixing clay, sand and water in a ring pit until it reached the right consistency for molding. The raw mixture was then brought to the skilled craftsman in the foreground who molded the bricks to the correct shape and stacked them to dry. I teglværket (At the Brickyard) picks up the production at a later stage of the drying process, with the bricks brought inside to be kiln-fired over the course of several days. While the molder wears working clothes identical to the two workers in I teglværket, his shoes are leather instead of the traditional Scandinavian wooden clogs seen in the present painting, a testament to the physical danger of their work compared with his.