Øvre Foss

Munch was 16 when he painted this, and he was supposed to be becoming an engineer. He had started at the technical college in Christiania in 1879 and kept missing classes through illness. In May 1880 he noted in his diary that he had begun his first painting, an old church. That November he left the college for good, wrote that he had made up his mind to be a painter, and enrolled in evening classes at the Royal School of Drawing. This is from the same year. Øvre Foss was an old farm by the upper falls of the Akerselva, the river that ran through the mill and factory edge of the city and past the districts where his family lived. He painted it at twelve by eighteen centimetres, about the size of a postcard.