Alice Ravnholt’s painting hangs in Ølstrup Church and at first may seem like a simple story about Easter morning: three women by a grave, darkness in the foreground and light behind. But the image also draws Ølstrup’s own landscape into the motif. The empty grave is painted after a photo of a burial chamber by Langdyssevej just outside the town.
The motif shows Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome, who come to anoint Jesus and discover that the grave is empty. The burial cloth in the painting points to the resurrection, and according to Ravnholt it was also the first thing she painted. She herself links the butterflies to the hymn “Opstanden er den Herre Krist” and the line “Som Han opstod, skal vi opstå”.
There are several small signs in the painting: the contrast between the darkness of the grave and the rising sun, a possible redware pot with the woman in the back, and a robin in a nest of thorn branches at the lower right.
The painting was created after the theft of Emil Nolde’s altarpiece in 2014. When the Nolde work came back, Ravnholt’s painting was not removed from the church interior, but placed on the north wall of the nave. It therefore stands both as newer church art and as a visible parenthesis in Ølstrup Church’s dramatic art history.
