Cypress in Moonlight

Munch spent the winter of 1891 to 1892 in Nice, with regular visits to the casino along the coast at Monte Carlo, and he painted the town after dark. The cypress in this street is the one solitary thing in the picture. Everything else arrives in twos: two pots on the windowsill, two lit windows across the way, two figures down in the street. Later in 1892 he took those same parts and rebuilt them around an embracing couple in The Kiss by the Window. The canvas belongs to a private owner and has hung on loan at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where curators set that lone tree beside the cypresses van Gogh had painted in Provence three years earlier.