A foggy day in autumn. A stream running through the meadow.

Autumn fog over a meadow stream is captured with characteristic restraint in this 1900 painting. Ring was deeply attentive to the psychological quality of specific weather conditions, and foggy autumn mornings — when moisture hangs in the low hollows of the Danish countryside and the world contracts to the nearest few dozen metres — were among the conditions he most often returned to. The stream running through the meadow provides movement within stillness, its dark line threading through pale grass. This was the landscape Ring knew most intimately, and the intimacy shows in the calm authority with which he constructs a scene that offers no obvious beauty but possesses quiet, irrefutable truth.

A pale, silvery tonality pervades the composition, with cool greys and muted greens dominant throughout. The stream is marked by darker, more fluid passages of paint, while the meadow grasses are built up with fine, overlapping strokes that suggest the way fog diffuses detail without entirely eliminating it.