Jealousy in the Garden

By 1929 Munch was in his mid-sixties, living quietly on his estate at Ekely outside Oslo. This garden scene looks like a new picture, yet it reaches back more than 30 years. Munch had first painted jealousy in the 1890s, out of the bohemian circle he ran with in Berlin, where he watched the Norwegian writer Dagny Juel marry his Polish friend Stanisław Przybyszewski while the men around her looked on. He returned to that wound again and again, in at least 11 painted versions across his life. Here the pattern is familiar. A brooding man fills the foreground, his face drained to a sickly green, while behind him a couple stand among the trees. The woman reaches toward an apple, an old echo of Eve in the garden. Eight of these jealousy paintings stayed with Munch and are now kept together in the Oslo museum built around his own collection.