Children in the Forest

Munch bought a small fisherman's cottage at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslofjord in 1898 and spent his summers there for years afterwards. Almost everything he painted in the place came out of a few hundred metres of it, the shoreline, the garden, the wood behind the town. Two children stand at the edge of that wood with their backs turned, small against the trunks, and he worked the motif more than once, another version of it titled as children on their way to the fairytale forest. He mixed casein, a glue made from milk, into the oil, which dries matt and leaves the weave of the canvas showing through the colour. When the picture went to the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912, where Munch was given a room of his own alongside rooms for Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin, the catalogue dated it 1901.