Two children walking along a road in the early spring.

Ring's 'Two Children Walking Along a Road in Early Spring' (1885) is one of his most tenderly observed subjects — the children's small forms moving through the landscape at the most hopeful of seasons, early spring's tentative warmth following winter's withdrawal. Ring's children subjects share the contemplative quality of all his human figures: these are not playful, active children but quiet presences in the landscape, their movement through the familiar road giving the image its gentle temporal dimension. The early spring setting — bare trees, first signs of growth — provides a seasonal context of renewal.

Ring integrates the two children within the early spring landscape through careful tonal management — the children's forms neither isolated against the background nor lost within it, but belonging to the same tonal and atmospheric world. The bare trees of early spring create a linear structure that the children move within. His palette for early spring combines the grey-brown of bare branches with the first tentative greens of emerging vegetation.