Man in the Cabbage Field

In 1916 most of Europe was three years into a war that was starving its cities, and Norway sat it out as a neutral country. That spring Munch bought Ekely, a small farm on the edge of Kristiania, today's Oslo, and this was among the first things he painted there. A man rises straight out of the cabbage rows, his arms loaded with the heavy green heads, filling the canvas from top to bottom. Nothing symbolic is piled onto him. He is a man with food in his arms in a year when food was the thing much of the continent lacked. Munch painted him big and solid in thick, bright colour, close enough that the field tilts up behind him like a wall of leaves. The collectors Charlotte and Christian Mustad gave the picture to Norway's National Gallery in 1937.