Morning

This is the Munch almost no one pictures. He painted Morning in 1884, when he was 20, nearly a decade before The Scream, working as a careful naturalist among the young Kristiania bohemians in what is now Oslo. The subject is ordinary and quiet. A young woman, most likely a housemaid judging by her plain clothes, sits on the edge of her bed in the early light, half dressed and not quite awake, turned toward the window. Munch gives real attention to her hands, reddened and roughened by work, and to a single button on her blouse still left undone. Nothing here forecasts the swirling anguish he became famous for. The picture belongs to his realist years of the 1880s, the period that first got him noticed. The industrialist Rasmus Meyer bought it early, which is why it hangs today in Bergen rather than Oslo.