The Rainbow

Munch painted this rainbow in 1918, the year the Great War finally stopped. By then he had left the city crowds behind and settled at Ekely, a property on the western edge of Kristiania, today's Oslo, where he spent his last decades painting the fields, trees and weather right outside his door. A rainbow is about the plainest subject there is, and after four years of news from the front there may have been some ease in painting the sky simply clearing. The following winter the Spanish flu reached him as well, and he survived it. What he set down here is the light over his own ground on one ordinary, changing day.