The Fairytale Forest

For much of the 1890s Munch had painted his own dread, the jealousy, the illness, the figure screaming on the bridge. Around 1901 he was spending his summers at Åsgårdstrand, a small bathing town on the Oslo fjord, and his subjects grew gentler. He made several pictures of children at the edge of a wood, this among them, and gave it the old Norwegian name for the enchanted forest of the fairy tales. Look closely at the surface: he thinned his paint so far that the bare canvas drank most of it in, leaving the trees dry and matt, almost like a faded wall painting.