Spring Day on Karl Johan

Say Munch and Karl Johan Street together and most people picture dread, the hollow-eyed crowd of his later Evening on Karl Johan. This earlier canvas is the opposite. It shows a bright spring afternoon on the main street of Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, sunlit and ordinary. Munch had just come back from Paris, where a state scholarship had sent him in 1889, and he had been looking hard at the French, at Monet's light and Seurat's small dabs of colour. Here he tries the method out on his own city's boulevard, the crowd and the sky broken into flecks. The unease that would define him was still a little way off. Two years later he painted this same street again, but at dusk, filled with the pale, staring faces he is now remembered for.