Puberty

Munch painted this girl on the edge of a bed four times. The first version, from 1886, burned in a house fire at its owner's, the doctor Axel Thoresen. In Berlin in 1894 Munch painted the subject twice more, and one of those canvases was bought by Norway's National Gallery in 1909. This is the fourth, made between 1914 and 1916, the years Munch spent on Jeløya, an island near Moss on the Oslofjord, while the First World War went on beyond neutral Norway. Twenty years on, the pose has hardly moved. Her arms still cross down over her lap, her knees are pressed together, and the dark shadow still rises beside her. What changed is the paint. This version is noticeably smaller than the Berlin canvases and far more colourful. Munch never sold it, and it came to the Munch Museum with the rest of the collection he left to the city of Oslo.