Karl Johan in the Rain

Karl Johans gate is the street on which Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, put itself on display, running from the railway station up to the royal palace past the parliament and the university. Munch painted it repeatedly around 1890, each time differently. In 1891 he was mostly out of the country on a state travel grant, wintering at Nice, passing through Paris in April and coming home by way of Antwerp in May. The Karl Johan pictures of these years are painted quickly and loosely, in a broken touch he had picked up from what he was seeing in France. A year after this rainy-day view he painted the same pavement as Evening on Karl Johan, with the crowd advancing straight at the viewer and the faces worked into masks. He kept the canvas, and it passed with the thousands of works he left the city of Oslo in his will when he died in 1944.