The sick man

The Sick Man (1902), at the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen, moves Ring inside — an unusual setting for a painter primarily associated with landscape — to depict a figure diminished by illness. Ring was drawn to subjects of physical vulnerability alongside his more famous pastoral scenes: the sick, the dying, and the aged appear in his work as figures who embody the fragility of life with the same quiet attention he brought to the fog-bound fields outside their windows. The Hirschsprung Collection, founded by tobacco manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung, is one of Denmark's premier institutions for Danish art.

The interior setting requires Ring to work with the specific quality of sickroom light — often window-light, softened and directional — falling across a figure whose prone or seated form is the compositional centre. His handling of interior light is as carefully observed as his landscape work, attending to the way diffuse light describes the volume of a face and the texture of bedding or chair fabric.