Two Children on their way to the Fairytale Forest

Munch painted this in 1901 or 1902, in the years when he had begun thinking in walls rather than single pictures. In 1902 he hung 22 canvases together at the Berlin Secession as one continuous frieze, and much of what he made around then was built to hold up at that size and distance. This is one of three closely related forest pictures. In another the children are a whole band, small against the trees. Here there are only two, on the track that runs into the wood. He used casein, a matt glue-based paint, with oil, straight onto unprimed canvas, so the weave stays visible and nothing shines. Twenty years on, the Freia chocolate factory in Kristiania commissioned a frieze from him, and forest children turn up in it again.