The Swamp

Munch painted this marsh in 1903, during a hard and unsettled stretch of his life. The year before, his long entanglement with Tulla Larsen had ended badly, a pistol went off in the final quarrel and wounded his left hand, and he was drinking heavily and living mostly in Germany, moving between exhibitions and portrait commissions. In summers he kept returning to the shore of the Oslofjord, where landscapes like this one were made. It is a quieter subject than the tormented figures he is best known for, boggy ground and still water under a pale northern sky.