Winter Night, Ekely

In the spring of 1930 a blood vessel burst in Munch's right eye. He was 66 and living alone at Ekely, his smallholding on the western edge of Oslo, and for months a dark clot drifted across his field of vision, changing shape from week to week. He drew it again and again to record what he was actually seeing. The winter pictures he made at Ekely in those years keep to what lay within a short walk of the door, his own house among bare trees, snow, the blue shadows thrown by moonlight. Bergen dates this one 1930 to 1931. The house itself was pulled down in 1960, and the brick winter studio he had enlarged shortly before is the one building on the property still standing.