At this time, Denmark was in political turmoil, as the Council President Estrup had bypassed democratic rule and governed through decrees.

Ring was politically active in the "Rifle movement", a revolutionary group of students taking up arms training in preparation for a rebellion.

[2] In 1894, Ring was used as a model for a character in the novel Night watch (Nattevagt) by the Danish author and later Nobel prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan, an old friend of his.

Ring served as a model for the unflattering character Thorkild Drehling, a painter and failed revolutionary, who was in love with his best friend's wife.

In 1900, he received the bronze medal at the World's Fair in Paris for his painting In the Garden Doorway, the Artist's Wife (I Havedøren, 1887).

He had a house built at Sankt Jørgensbjerg in Roskilde, overlooking the fjord - here he spent the last decade of his life, before his death in 1933.

[6] A feature often seen in Ring's art is to place one or more objects at the edge of picture, which can be seen in e.g. Runesten ved Roskilde Landevej, Når taget ventes.

Lundbye, but he also incorporated influences from more modernist painters such Paul Gauguin, Jean François Raffaëlli and Jean-François Millet.

[6] Early scholarship discussed whether Ring was best to be considered a realist or a symbolist painter, but later scholars have accepted that the two aspects of his work are equally important and complement each other.

As a painter, Ring never distanced himself from his humble origin, but rather made it his dominant theme, depicting the reality of rural life.

This is visible for example in his painting Gleaners (Axsamlere 1887) showing how the rural poor would pick up the grain left behind by the increasingly industrial methods of harvesting, a motif first made famous by Millet.

[9] Inspired by authors such as J.P. Jacobsen and the ideas of the Modern Breakthrough, Ring became an atheist, and his painting began to explore motifs and symbolism that contrasted forces of life and death.

However, the idea was discarded and was instead incorporated in Efter solnedgang, "Nu skrider Dagen under, og Natten vælder ud, which represent the culmination of Ring's preoccupation with death as a motif in painting.

[14] In Ring's art the road and the path are recurring themes, and other lines such as creeks, rivers and estuaries, the open sea and modern elements e.g. bridges, railway tracks and telephone cables are used as main motifs.

In some of the threshold paintings the person depicted is in a hesitant position in front of the doorway or window waiting to be able to connect with the outside world.