The Seine at Saint-Cloud

In the winter of 1889 and into 1890, Edvard Munch was living just outside Paris, at Saint-Cloud on the Seine, on a Norwegian state grant. He was 27 and had come to France to learn from its painters, and you can watch that study happening here. The river is built up from small, careful dabs of colour laid in strict horizontal bands, the pointillist method he was picking up from the French neo-impressionists that season. Within a few years he would abandon this patient, dotted surface for the raw, inward pictures that made his name. That winter, though, he painted the Seine over and over, at different hours and from different angles, and this is one of those views.