Brothel Scene

Munch was back in Paris in the spring of 1897, showing at the Salon des Indépendants, and the brothel interior was a subject the city had been looking at hard. Toulouse-Lautrec's Elles, a set of lithographs of the women of a Montmartre house going about their ordinary mornings, had come out the year before. The Munch Museum dates this canvas somewhere between 1897 and 1899, years in which he barely settled anywhere. He left Paris that June, and in July he bought himself a small wooden house on the shore at Åsgårdstrand, on the fjord south of Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. The subject stayed with him. Around 1903, by then living in Germany, he painted a whole group of brothel interiors, and one of those now hangs in the same museum with its yellows faded out to white.