Landscape from Kragerø

In the summer of 1912 the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne gave Munch a room to himself in the middle of a show built around Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin, with more than 30 of his paintings in it. He was 48 and being treated in Germany as one of the people modern painting had come from. Since 1909 he had been living at Kragero on the south coast of Norway, in a rented property called Skrubben above the water, working outdoors on canvases far too big for a room. That coast of bare rock, pines and open sea fed the huge university decorations he was planning and smaller pictures like this one, painted in greens, blues and pinks as the winter came off the landscape. It reached the Metropolitan Museum through Scofield Thayer, an American magazine editor who bought Munch in the 1920s.