Two Girls with Blue Aprons

By 1904 Munch was living mostly in Germany, where dealers had taken on his paintings and his prints and given him a steadier income than Norway ever had, and he came back each summer to Asgardstrand, the small coastal town south of Oslo where he had bought a fisherman's cottage in 1898. The children of that town appear in his work again and again, and these two were painted there across the summers of 1904 and 1905. They are dressed identically, almost in a uniform, and the museum in Oslo points out how little he gives them in the way of eyes, barely more than slits. What separates the two girls is how they stand. He never signed the canvas and never sold it, and it went to the city of Oslo with the rest of his studio after he died in 1944.