The Girls on the Bridge

Munch made this in the summer of 1901, in the small Norwegian coast town of Asgardstrand, where he took a cottage and returned for years. Three girls in white, red and green lean on the railing of a bridge with their backs to us, looking out over the still water toward the pale houses of the village. When it was first shown that autumn in Kristiania he called it Summer Evening. This is the first of the group. Munch would paint the same bridge and the same clustered figures over and over across the next two decades, changing the season, the colour, the ages of the women, the mood. Here it is calm, a warm northern night with the whole coastline held in the bend of the wooden rail.