New Snow

Around 1900, while he was gathering his anguished paintings of love and death into the cycle he called the Frieze of Life, Munch was also painting something much quieter. On the outskirts of Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, he made a run of winter landscapes, and the National Gallery there bought one of them in 1901. This canvas, which the Munch Museum dates to the winter of 1900 and 1901, belongs with those pictures. A road curves away between tall spruces, their branches weighed down with fresh snow. Munch had already worked through the dark spruce forest as a motif the year before, in several versions on canvas and on bare wooden panel, and a charcoal drawing titled Fresh Snow comes from the same months as this painting. His signature, E Munch, sits low on the left, in red.