Autumn

Munch signed this picture across two years. The inscription at the lower right reads 1897 to 1898, so it sat through two autumns before he let it go. Those were the years he stopped living out of other people's rooms. Through the 1890s he had moved between rented lodgings in Berlin, Paris and Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. In 1897 he sent ten paintings from his Frieze of Life to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. The year after, he paid 900 kroner for a small wooden beach house at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord, the first property he had ever owned. The canvas is a square, 67 centimetres each way, and what he put into it is a road, a house and a figure walking. He kept the Åsgårdstrand house until he died, and it is still standing.