Three Girls in Åsgårdstrand

Åsgårdstrand is a small coastal town south of Oslo. Munch bought a cottage there in 1898 and came back nearly every summer for 20 years, painting the same shoreline, the same wooden houses, the same girls on the road down to the water. The summer of 1905 ended that run. The painter Ludvig Karsten came to visit, the two men quarrelled and then fought in Munch's own garden, Karsten taking a cut above the eye and Munch a broken arm. He left in a hurry and did not come back for four years. This canvas is from that year, and it ended up in Stockholm, in the villa of Ernest Thiel, a banker who was buying Munch steadily at the time and whose house is now the museum that keeps it.