From Maridalen

In 1880 Munch walked out of the technical college in Kristiania, where he had been training as an engineer, and wrote in his diary that he had decided to become a painter. From 1881 he was a pupil of the sculptor Julius Middelthun at the Royal School of Drawing, and this small study belongs to that first year. Maridalen is a farming valley just north of the city, close enough that people walked out to it for the day. He painted it on a piece of unprimed cardboard barely 22 centimetres tall, the red farm buildings set between the birches and a stretch of water, with low hills closing off the far end of the valley. The standard catalogue of his paintings, compiled by the curator Gerd Woll, lists this one as number 21.