The Girls on the Bridge

By 1927 Munch had been coming back to this same footbridge for close to 30 years. It stands in Aasgaardstrand, a small bathing town on the Oslo fjord where he bought himself a little house in 1898 and spent his summers among the locals. The young women leaning on the rail were neighbours he knew, and the pale shape behind them is a large house in the town with an old lime tree rising over its roof. He first set the scene down around 1901 and then returned to it more than a dozen times in paint and print, changing small things each round, turning the nearest girl in white to face the other way, once adding a fourth to the group. This canvas, made when he was in his 60s, follows that first version closely, the water below still holding the reflection of the houses and the pale summer sky.