Evening. Melancholy

In the autumn of 1891 Munch sent this canvas to the annual exhibition in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, under the plain title Evening. The catalogue listed it among the drawings, pastels and watercolours, and it is easy to see why. It is oil, pencil and crayon on canvas, and in many places the bare cloth shows through. The scene comes from that summer at Åsgårdstrand, a small resort on the Oslo fjord. The brooding man in the foreground was painted from Munch's friend Jappe Nilssen, then 21 and caught up in an unhappy affair with Oda Krohg, a married painter ten years older. Out by the jetty, small figures head for a yellow boat. One of the critics who praised the picture was Oda's husband, the painter Christian Krohg. In the newspaper Verdens Gang he thanked Munch for making the boat yellow.