Three Seated Young Women

In 1906 the Berlin theatre director Max Reinhardt asked Munch to paint a frieze for an upstairs hall in his new Kammerspiele, the small stage attached to the Deutsches Theater. Munch worked on it into 1907, and this canvas comes from the same months and is made the same way. He laid tempera straight onto coarse, unprimed canvas, which soaks up the paint and leaves it matt and chalky, closer to a wall painting than to an oil. You can see the bare brownish weave of the canvas across the whole upper half of the picture. The frieze set its figures on the shore at Åsgårdstrand, the fjord village where Munch kept a summer house, and the museum's catalogue places these three young women by the sea as well. Unlike the frieze panels, this one was never sold. It is unsigned, and it stayed with Munch until it passed to the city of Oslo with the rest of his estate.