Winter in the Woods, Nordstrand

In the winter of 1899 Munch spent several weeks at his family's home at Nordstrand, then just outside Kristiania, as Oslo was called, and this is one of the pictures he made there. It looks into a dark spruce wood lit from below by the snow. There are no people, only a track curving through the foreground where someone has already walked. He painted it quickly and thinly, in oil on brown cardboard, and in many places the board shows through the paint. The heavy branches are laid in with fast, looping strokes of white. The museum sees it as the start of a new interest in landscape for Munch, and in the months that followed he painted several more forest interiors. He sold this one to the National Gallery in Kristiania in 1901, and that same year the gallery's buyers were already weighing which Munch to add next, with The Scream among the candidates.