Workers on their Way Home

Munch rented a farm called Grimsrod on the island of Jeloya in 1913, just outside the Norwegian town of Moss. Moss was a working town with an engineering works, a shipyard and a glassworks, and the road past his gate filled twice a day as the shifts changed. He painted that road repeatedly over the next two years. This version, the one in Copenhagen, is from 1914, when Norway's trade unions were growing fast and Munch was saying openly that the workers would be the country's coming force. He sends the column straight down the road at the viewer, faces pressed close and legs foreshortened, so the crowd looks about to walk out of the picture. He was 50 that year, and had just secured the largest public commission of his life, the murals for the assembly hall of the university in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called.