Summer

In 1891 Munch was 27 and had just spent two winters in France on a state grant, where the newest painting taught him that a picture could be built from loose colour rather than careful drawing. He brought the lesson home to Norway, and this summer scene shows it plainly. It is done in pastel and wax crayon, laid down in quick open strokes, with wide areas left thin and barely worked. At home that looked like carelessness. Critics in Kristiania kept complaining that his pictures were unfinished, that he had walked away from them halfway, and the charge followed him for years. The very thing they disliked, the frank sketchiness and the blocks of pure colour, is now read as the modern side of his work. He would paint The Scream only two years later, in 1893.