Coastal Landscape at Hvitsten

Munch painted this in 1915, the second winter of the First World War, on the coast at Hvitsten, a small harbour village on the Oslo fjord. Norway stayed neutral, and Munch spent these years close to home. Five years earlier he had bought a house at Hvitsten called Nedre Ramme, and there he worked on the huge canvases he was making for the assembly hall of the university in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. The university had finally accepted them in 1914 after years of argument, and they were installed in 1916. Alongside them he kept painting the shore around the house. Snow lies over the rocks of the shore and runs down to the water, with the fjord opening out behind. The canvas is about one and a half metres wide. It belongs to the Batliner Collection, which the Liechtenstein collector Herbert Batliner placed on long-term loan with the Albertina in Vienna.