Dark Spruce Forest

Munch painted this around 1899, in the years he was assembling the Frieze of Life, his cycle of pictures about love, dread and death. People forget how much of a landscape painter he was, since more than half of everything he made is scenery. Here he stands among tall Norwegian spruces at dusk, their trunks close and dark, the forest floor a raw reddish brown. He worked it thinly in casein and oil on rough, unprimed canvas, letting the weave of the cloth show through so the whole surface feels dry and cold. There are no figures and no story, only the trees pressing in and the last light going out of the day. He returned to this same kind of northern wood again and again over the next few years, reworking the motif.