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拍品专文
Laurits Andersen Ring was born in the village of Ring in South Zealand, Denmark. He was to become one of the finest Danish painters of his generation, no mean feat in a generation of painters which included such notable names as his friend Vilhelm Hammershøi, Carl Holsøe, Peter Ilsted, and Peder Mørk Monsted. Ring’s rural childhood and adolescence meant he grew up in humble circumstances, and the farmers and fieldworkers he knew as a young man served as a source of inspiration throughout his life. Unlike other painters of the 19th century who romanticized farm life and viewed it as the antidote to the troubles of modernity, Ring seems to express little judgement about the progress of modernity and industrialization that was a hallmark of his time, capturing what was before him simply as a Realist. Ring believed passionately that the working-class people in Denmark deserved better treatment (the artist was an avowed Socialist and revolutionary in his youth), and depicting working people with a dignity and a monumentality was foremost on the artist’s mind in selecting his subject matter.
Henry Wivel praised L. A. Ring as 'the painter of roads par excellence within Danish art' (H. Wivel, L.A. Ring, Copenhagen, 1997, p. 50), and in the present work the dirt path cutting centrally through the picture plane provides a framing device for the Rückenfigur of an old man walking through the field. Slightly stooped, and walking with the aid of a cane, he is still a figure of dignity, taking up almost the entire center of the canvas while the sea of rye seems to part before him. Ring omits almost all details of the setting other than the roof of a house just visible over the tops of the stalks of grain, keeping the focus on the figure and the landscape. Like many of the artist’s paintings it can be understood both literally and symbolically–an old man returning home after a day of work, but also a symbolic representation of man at the end of his life, walking away from the living and returning to home and to the land.
Henry Wivel praised L. A. Ring as 'the painter of roads par excellence within Danish art' (H. Wivel, L.A. Ring, Copenhagen, 1997, p. 50), and in the present work the dirt path cutting centrally through the picture plane provides a framing device for the Rückenfigur of an old man walking through the field. Slightly stooped, and walking with the aid of a cane, he is still a figure of dignity, taking up almost the entire center of the canvas while the sea of rye seems to part before him. Ring omits almost all details of the setting other than the roof of a house just visible over the tops of the stalks of grain, keeping the focus on the figure and the landscape. Like many of the artist’s paintings it can be understood both literally and symbolically–an old man returning home after a day of work, but also a symbolic representation of man at the end of his life, walking away from the living and returning to home and to the land.