Street in Åsgårdstrand and a Woman in Red Dress

This is a real place, a single street in Åsgårdstrand, a tiny bathing town on the Oslofjord where Edvard Munch spent his summers and, around 1898, bought a small house of his own. The town is barely more than a shoreline, a road and a line of white fences, yet it is the stage on which some of his most famous paintings were set. The curving beach here is the beach of 'The Girls on the Bridge,' and the long summer street is the street of 'The Dance of Life.' A woman in a red dress, like this one, is a figure Munch returned to again and again in those Åsgårdstrand years. He painted this around 1902, flattening the road and the fences into broad bands of colour and drawing the woman with a single heavy outline, the same modern handling he used in the pictures that made his name. The red dress is the one loud note in a street otherwise gone quiet and pale in the northern light.