Evening. Death and the Old Woman

Laurits Andersen Ring was one of Denmark's most original painters, bridging naturalist landscape tradition and the broader Symbolist current of the 1880s and 1890s. This 1887 work, Evening: Death and the Old Woman, is among his most explicitly allegorical canvases, depicting a cloaked, skeletal Death figure accompanying an elderly woman through a twilit rural landscape. Ring drew on Northern Romantic traditions — particularly German Romanticism's fascination with mortality and the figure moving through nature — while grounding the scene in the specific light and atmosphere of the Danish countryside. The painting is held by Statens Museum for Kunst.

Ring sets the scene at dusk, with a deepening violet-grey sky that gives the work its brooding, melancholic tone. The two figures are silhouetted against the fading light, their forms simplified into near-silhouettes.