Dance on the Shore

Munch painted this around 1900, one panel in the great cycle he called the Frieze of Life, a sequence about love, anxiety and death that he kept rearranging for decades. The setting is Åsgårdstrand, the little Norwegian resort on the Oslofjord where he spent his summers, and the pale band of light running down the water is the reflection of the summer night's low moon, a shape that recurs across the whole cycle. Young dancers turn on the shore while two women in dark dresses stand apart, watching. What makes this particular canvas worth knowing is where it went. In 1905 the Mánes society of artists brought Munch to Prague for a show that startled a generation of Czech painters, and the sculptor Stanislav Sucharda bought this picture straight off its walls. That is how a Norwegian summer night ended up in Prague, where it now hangs in the National Gallery.