In Open Air

In 1891 Edvard Munch, then twenty-seven, was living on a Norwegian state travel grant that kept him in France for much of the year, between Paris and the warm coast at Nice. It was his close encounter with French painting, and for a while it pulled him outdoors and into the light. Painters in Paris were then building pictures from small separate touches of pure colour, and Munch tried the method himself that year. This open-air scene comes from that moment, before he settled into the dark indoor subjects of love, illness and dread that would fill his Frieze of Life. He kept the canvas his whole life, and it entered the Munch Museum in Oslo with the thousands of works he left to the city when he died in 1944.