LAURITS ANDERSEN RING (DANISH, 1854-1933)

Laurits Anderson Ring’s father earned a living as a farm labourer. The artist would return to these origins in his realist depictions of rural life in Denmark. Ring had fostered his interest in harvest subjects around Denmark in the early 1880’s: in Ludby in 1882 and in Rågelund in 1884. Ring used his brother, Ole Peter Anderson, as the model for the harvester in the present picture, and would use his farm in Tehusene as the setting. Ring would return to this composition in various preparatory drawings, pastel and oil studies around 1885-86. He would use swift, bold and impressionistic brush strokes to create a sense of movement as the scythe is swung and the harvest is collected. This work is a reduction of the very large work which Ring prepared for the 1885 exhibition as the first of his series of large-scale works and which is now in the collection of the SMK, Copenhagen. As Miriam Have Watts observes of the larger version, "Ring reshaped the harvester to eradicate his personal features along with his half-turned face. The movement of his stout, elongated arms is transplanted into the circle described by the scythe as the implement makes its steady way into the stalks. The hue of ripe corn rests evenly over the scene, and the lines emanating from the body at work become almost ornamental" (Harvest in P.N. Larsen, L.A. Ring On the Edge of the World, Copenhagen, 2006 p.222). A version of a similar size to this work was gifted to the Danish State in 1954.