Four Girls in Åsgårdstrand

Åsgårdstrand was a small fishing and holiday village on the Oslo fjord where Munch spent his summers, and in 1898 he bought a little cottage there. The bright yellow board wall behind these four children is the wall of that house, which still stands today as a small museum. He lined up four of the neighbours' children facing straight out, close together, in their plain summer clothes. Munch painted the children of Åsgårdstrand many times around the turn of the century, and they became one of his steady group motifs, set against the same fences, shorelines and walls. This was 1903, the year after a violent quarrel in that same village with Tulla Larsen, a woman he had nearly married, which ended with a revolver going off and cost him the top of a finger. None of that shows here. The mood is quiet and frontal, the faces turned toward us with an even, trusting calm.