Red Rocks by Åsgårdstrand

By 1904 Munch was finally doing well in Germany. He was elected to the Berlin Secession that year and signed a contract handing his prints to the publisher Bruno Cassirer, and he spent his autumns and winters in Berlin. The summers he kept for Norway, for a short curve of shore at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslofjord, where he had bought a small wooden house in the 1890s. He had been painting this beach since 1889, and its pale arc runs all the way through the Frieze of Life. Here he came in close instead and gave most of the canvas over to the red rocks along the waterline. The house he worked from still stands a few minutes from those stones and is open to visitors.