At the French Windows. The Artist's Wife

Ring married Sigrid Kähler in 1896, and this is the painting he made the next year, at 43, of his young wife standing at the tall garden doors of their home near Karrebæksminde. She is quietly pregnant with their first child, and the light of a Danish spring falls across her and the flowering plants on the sill. Ring had spent years painting hard rural poverty and lonely figures in flat landscapes, so this domestic calm is a real shift in his work, the moment his own settled life enters the pictures. Look at how the window frame and the world outside are pushed almost flat behind her, keeping the eye on the figure. It won him a bronze medal at the 1900 world's fair in Paris.