Two Young Girls in the Garden

The two girls came from Åsgårdstrand, the small fishing village on the Oslofjord where Munch kept a summer house, and they posed for him there in 1905. Next to the dark pictures of the 1890s that made his name, the subject is almost old-fashioned, two girls beside a young apple tree in blossom, which the Rotterdam museum reads as a sign of youthful innocence. What stayed controversial for a long time was the handling, the loose strokes and the loud greens, reds and blues. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen bought the canvas in 1957. In a radio talk in 1968, Wim Beeren, who later ran the museum, described the pair as daughters of a well-off village family in their Sunday clothes, standing stiffly because they could feel the man at the easel watching them.