Afternoon at Olaf Rye's Square

Munch was 19 or 20 when he made this, and he was painting out of a window. The family lived on Olaf Rye's Square in Grünerløkka, the district east of the river in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, that had gone up fast in the 1860s and 1870s to house people arriving for factory work. His father was the poor quarter's doctor. Munch had walked out of engineering school a couple of years earlier to paint, and in 1883 he showed work in public for the first time. The Stockholm picture is narrow and upright, about 48 centimetres high, and painted on cardboard rather than canvas. The museum dates it to 1883 or 1884. It gives the square in the afternoon light, the young trees of the new park and small figures crossing the open ground.