The museum keeps only the Danish title — I Høst, “In Harvest” — and the canvas is inscribed in the painter’s hand L.A. Ring. 85. In 1955 the picture was given to the Danish state by the director O. P. Christensen and transferred to the Prime Ministry; the gallery records its acquisition in 1994, and it hangs in the museum’s 19th-century rooms. It has been shown in the museum’s own L.A. Ring – på kanten af verden (2006, and at Randers Kunstmuseum in 2007) and Nordic Highlights (2017), in the touring On the Edge of the World: Masterworks by Laurits Andersen Ring from SMK (National Nordic Museum, Seattle, 2019–20, and the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, 2020), in L. A. Ring – Årstiderne at Ribe, Fuglsang and Øregaard (2022–23), and in Kunstnerbrødre: L.A. Ring og H.A. Brendekilde at Randers Kunstmuseum (2018–19). It appears in the 1910 catalogue of the painter’s work compiled by H. Chr. Christensen as no. 50, in Tranches de vie: le naturalisme en Europe 1875–1915 (1996) and Det moderne gennembrud 1870–1890 (2002), and in Henrik Wivel’s L.A. Ring. Årstiderne (2022).
Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933) was born in the south-Zealand village whose name he took as his own, and he trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and afterwards at the painters’ study school there. The countryside and the people who worked it remained his subject for fifty years; the museum places his painting beside Vilhelm Hammershøi’s in both format and significance, and reads it as reaching past the local into the symbolist currents of its time. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).