MURA · THE COLLECTION · L.A. RING

The Road near Næstved

The Road near Næstved is an oil painting by L.A. Ring, dated by the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) to 1893-1896 and catalogued as View from a Road near Næstved, Zealand. It measures 51.5 by 78 cm, entered the museum's collection in February 2017, and hangs in Room 228 under the inventory number KMS8892.

L.A. Ring · 1893-1896 · Oil on canvas · Danish painting · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum's title places the view on a road near Næstved in southern Zealand. Mura's catalogue entry describes a pale road curving towards red roofs and spring-green trees under a clear blue sky. Næstved is home ground for Ring: he was born on 15 August 1854 in the village of Ring, in what is now Næstved Municipality, and took the village's name as his own in 1881.

The road is the leading motif of Ring's art, according to SMK's biography of him: not only highways, sunken lanes and field paths, but also waterways and modern additions such as bridges, railway tracks and telephone wires. These roads lead the eye into the picture and out again, and the museum reads them not only literally but as images of human existence. Ring was prone to depression, the text adds, yet his reading of the road of life is the opposite: dynamic, modern, concerned with the world here and now.

How it was painted

The painting is oil on canvas and is not dated. SMK's record gives a working date of about 1895 and notes that it was probably made in 1895-96, citing Lise Jeppesen's 2007 study Udtryk from Randers Kunstmuseum. Those years bracket a turning point in Ring's life: in 1893 he travelled to Italy on a study grant, and on 25 July 1896 he married Sigrid Kähler, daughter of the ceramic artist Herman Kähler. SMK describes his method as a precise registration of the village and the cultivated land around it, sharpened by unusual cropping and a refined sense of composition.

Where it went

SMK acquired the painting on 23 February 2017. Two years later it travelled with the exhibition On the Edge of the World: Masterworks by Laurits Andersen Ring from SMK, shown at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle (2019-20) and the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut (2020). It is listed in the museum's 2006 retrospective catalogue L.A. Ring - på kanten af verden and in Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen's Havebilleder (1997). The inventory number is KMS8892, and the record states that it is on display in Room 228.

Why it is in Mura

The painting belongs to Mura's Nordic Light collection with the mood luminous: a pale road, red roofs and fresh green under a clear sky.