Woman with Children

The Munch Museum's own catalogue describes this as pencil and oil on unprimed cardboard, and it puts a question mark after the oil. Pencil drawing and thin paint share the surface, and because the board was never primed, its plain brown stays part of the picture. Munch made it in 1907, in a stretch when the figure of a naked woman standing among small children kept coming back in his work. The museum lists pen drawings of women and children from 1906 and 1907 beside it, and a crayon study from the following year for a female nude with children. Here she stands with her back to us, children pressed against her on both sides, a tree trunk and a strip of shore behind them. He never signed it. Like most of the paintings in the Munch Museum, it stayed with him until his death in 1944 and passed to the city of Oslo under his will.