Landscape with Trees and Water

In 1880 a young Norwegian who wanted to paint had few places to learn. Norway had no art academy of its own, and the painters who had made Norwegian landscape famous had built their careers in Germany, in Dresden and Düsseldorf. Edvard Munch, 16 that year, was still largely teaching himself, and small oil sketches like this one were part of how he did it. It is painted on a piece of cardboard only 14 by 17.5 centimetres. On the right stands a clump of birches in autumn yellow, their white trunks showing through the leaves. Across the pale water, a point of dark firs fades into mist. When Gerd Woll of the Munch Museum catalogued all of his known paintings, in a book published in 2009, she placed this one at number 7, among the very earliest. It is unsigned and belongs to a private collection.