There is no doubt what the painting A Summer's Day on Roskilde Fjord shows; but there is still something odd about it. Maybe it is the simple surfaces of green and blue. Maybe it is the contrast between the soft, organic coast in the foreground and the hard, tight lines in the view of the fjord and the horizon? Or is it the bold crop that lets the small group of fishing boats on the water play a secondary part - all the way out there on the edge of the set. The picture is mysterious. It is as if it wants to accomplish something more than just a beautiful view.
The mental landscape
L.A. Ring shows us that a landscape painting can do so much more than just describe nature seen from a hillside or vantage point. He clears the motif of unnecessary detail and creates a different landscape space. It is empty and indefinable. It is raised above time and place. If you cover the boats with a finger, the picture is nearly abstract. L.A. Ring changes the landscape to an inner, mental room in which the spectator can mirror his own feelings and moods. Try it yourself.
Visionary peasant painter
L.A. Ring is one of the most significant landscape painters in Danish art. He was from the country himself. Although he liked to describe nature and life among the peasants, he was not a peasant painter in the traditional sense of the word. He did not approach his art in the literal sense. He was a "symbolist". Ring often painted the road: the gravel road, the high road or - as here - a waterway, using it as a symbol of the life journey that lies ahead of all of us.
At the same time he was visionary in his art. With his quaint cropping and abstract spaces without action, he points forward towards modernism, like his colleague Hammershoei. Pictures capturing other sides of reality than the one we can see with the naked eye.
Trine Moeller Madsen is a writer on art and cultural affairs and an author. Among her works is "KUNST" ("Art") (Gyldendal, 2004), a textbook on image analysis for the oldest students in the Danish Folkeskole.
A Summer's Day on Roskilde Fjord, 1900
Photo: Niels Erik Høybye