The museum keeps only the Danish title — Lampelys. Interiør med kunstnerens hustru, “Lamplit. Interior with the Artist’s Wife” — and dates the canvas 1898. It measures 68 × 87 cm and is painted in oil on canvas; the museum holds it in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture.
The museum’s own account of Ring makes the room of a country house his central subject, and reads the interiors through their thresholds: guests arrive from outside, the postman comes in with newspapers and letters, and windows and doors are pointed up as the places where a larger world shows through. It notes how far he kept from the sentimental and anecdotal traits that made so much rural painting of the period saleable in the cities, and how consequently his pictures carried a symbolist dimension — enough, the gallery writes, for him to be set beside Vilhelm Hammershøi in format and in weight.
L.A. Ring (1854–1933) was born Laurits Andersen in the South Zealand village of Ring, whose name he took as his own, and trained first as a house painter before entering the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1870s; like his friend and fellow student H.A. Brendekilde he came from a village milieu, and the countryside and the people who worked it stayed his subject for the rest of his life. He was a socialist in his youth without letting it turn his painting to propaganda, and the gallery’s account describes his social feeling as living instead in the precision of his observation. He married Sigrid Kähler in 1896, and his last landscapes were painted at Skt. Jørgensbjerg near Roskilde. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).