Beach with Rocks

This is the shore at Åsgårdstrand, a small resort town on the Oslofjord where Edvard Munch spent his summers and, from 1897, owned a little house. He knew this curving beach so well that he once said walking through the town was like strolling through his own pictures. In the 1890s that same stretch of sand had been the setting for the human dramas of his Frieze of Life, the couples and solitary figures of love and loneliness. Here, in 1904, the people are gone. Munch looks away from the village and gives the canvas over to the rounded rocks and the water, painting the coastline that ran through so much of his work. He returned to this motif repeatedly that year, the boulders set down in bands of different sizes and colour.