Night in Nice

We tend to file Munch under dread, the open mouth of The Scream and its blood-red sky. That picture was still two years off in 1891, when he painted this instead, a quiet blue night on the French Riviera. He was 28 and wintering in Nice on a Norwegian state grant, far from the grey north, and what he set down here is mostly darkness and cool blue, a town settling into the night. The same year, the National Gallery in Oslo bought it for 200 kroner, the first time any museum had spent money on a Munch. He would spend the next decade becoming the painter of anxiety we think we know, and the institution that later filled rooms with him began with this calm southern night.