Winternacht

By 1900 Munch had already painted The Scream and much of his Frieze of Life, and he was living unsettled, moving between European cities and cheap lodgings around Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. He spent two winters at a boarding house at Nordstrand, above the fjord, and painted the view from his window again and again. Winter Night is one of these. The colours are held right down: dark firs in the foreground, the pale sweep of snow and frozen water, the low islands beyond. There are no figures and no story, only the cold light of a northern evening. He was turning the landscape itself into a mood, the same charged stillness he had given to people. This version he showed to acclaim at the Vienna Secession in 1904.