Jour d'été sur le fjord de Roskilde

Ring had made his name in the 1880s as a painter of poor farmworkers, plain and unsentimental. By 1900, when he painted this stretch of Roskilde Fjord on Zealand, he had turned to something quieter and stranger. The water lies dead still, a few fishing boats resting on it, and the whole scene is caught at the moment just after sunrise when the light has arrived but carries no warmth yet. He had recently married and started a family, and the picture is often read as being about beginnings, the passage from night into day. Danes later chose it for their official canon of national culture. The far shore dissolves into pale blue where the fjord meets the sky.