I havedøren. Kunstnerens hustru

Ring married Sigrid Kähler in 1896, the year before he painted her standing in the garden door of their house; he was forty-two, she twenty-two. The museum reads the canvas as a declaration of love to his young wife, with the flowering garden beyond her as the image of a happiness he was careful not to claim too confidently — a dark and almost crippled branch grows up through the middle of the picture, and the museum’s account of the work treats that interruption as the memento mori that Ring, an atheist, set against the confidence of the spring. It belongs to the years of the “modern breakthrough” in Denmark, when the portrait of a wife could be something other than an assertion of status, and it is one of the pictures the museum itself counts among its foremost highlights; its Ring holding, thirty-two paintings, is the largest anywhere. The canvas entered the collection in 1924. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).