The Seine at Saint-Cloud

At the end of 1889, weeks after his father's death in Norway, Munch moved out of Paris to Saint-Cloud and rented rooms above a café looking onto the Seine. The dark interior he painted there, Night in Saint-Cloud, is now in Oslo's National Museum. Over that winter and spring he also painted the river outside, from different angles and at different times of day, and this canvas belongs to that run. A tree trunk cuts the picture from top to bottom, a railing runs along the quay, a boat crosses, and villas line the far bank. The water is built from short horizontal strokes and small touches of blue, green and yellow, the methods of the Impressionists and the newer pointillists he had been looking at in Paris. The Munch Museum's catalogue lists three other versions of this view from 1890, one at Vassar College in New York State and two in private hands.