Trees and Garden Wall in Åsgårdstrand

Asgardstrand was a small fishing and holiday village on the Oslofjord where Munch spent his summers, and in 1898 he finally bought a little house of his own there. By 1904, when he painted this garden wall and its trees, most of his year was spent in Germany, moving between hotels and clinics and drinking hard. Asgardstrand was the place he kept coming back to. The long northern summer light there, and the strong colour it gave the shoreline, stayed in his palette for the rest of his life. This is one of a run of garden and orchard views he made on the same small plot, four years before the breakdown that put him in a Copenhagen clinic.