In these years, he painted peaceful rural scenes, without the social narratives which had featured in his earlier work.
naturalism
A decade in which Ring’s life and work were transformed by marriage to his muse, Sigrid. Many of his best paintings are here.
Transition from paintings of an elderly couple struggling to survive a harsh winter, to well-dressed girls sewing in the sun.
A remarkable series showing skilled workers at their workplaces, then a visit to Italy, where he painted 3 mummified corpses in the catacombs. Also his finest landscape.
Social realism in the stony fields of Denmark, a wonderful view of Jerusalem, and his friend LA Ring facing a passing critic – and more.
His breakthrough came in 1884, with the first of a series of social realist paintings. It was a hard life in the Danish countryside, and death is never far away.
Brought up in a poor country family, he trained as a sculptor first, then switched to painting. A selection of his early social realist works, comparable with those of Jules Bastien-Lepage.
Naturalism was a phenomenon of Northern Europe, centred in Paris with Jules Bastien-Lepage as its high priest. Except here it is in the Italian island of Sicily, in the backstreets of Catania.
Eight of Cabanel’s most precocious and brilliant pupils. Only one won the Prix de Rome, and the others went on to develop Naturalist art. Was Cabanel the father of this new movement?
A precocious painter who was a favourite of Napoleon III, he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts for 25 years. Many of his students became Naturalists. Coincidence? Here’s his story and work.
The Eclectic Light Company 