Street in Åsgårdstrand

Åsgårdstrand was a small fishing and bathing town on the Oslofjord where Munch spent most of his summers from the mid-1880s, and in 1898 he bought a little house there. He painted its shoreline and its one main street so often that the curving row of pale houses and the line of linden trees became a kind of stage he returned to for years. This is that street in 1901, in the flat pale light of a Nordic summer, the fences and walls leaning slightly as the road bends away. The same gently curving shore and white picket fences turn up in his famous Girls on the Bridge, painted in these same years just a short walk from here. In this one there is no drama, only the empty road and the long light. Munch kept the house for the rest of his life, and it still stands as a small museum in the town.