Four Girls on the Bridge

Edvard Munch kept coming back to this one view for years. It is a wooden pier at Asgardstrand, a small resort on the Oslo fjord where he had a cottage and spent his summers, with the same steep-roofed house and the same clump of trees mirrored in the still water. Between about 1899 and the mid-1900s he painted the scene perhaps a dozen times, changing the number of figures, the season, the mood. This version, from 1905, sets a small group of young women at the rail, their backs to us, looking down. Munch was by then well known across Germany, which is how a Norwegian summer scene came to hang in Cologne. He gives almost as much care to the reflection of the pale house as to the house itself, so the lower half of the picture becomes a second, wavering town under the first.