Paisaje

This is a small thing, 35 centimetres high, green fields with a wooded ridge behind them and houses at the edge of the trees. Munch painted it in 1890, and it was long catalogued as a study rather than a finished picture. It is in Bergen because of Rasmus Meyer, a businessman of that city who bought Munch steadily in the years when much of Norway was still arguing about him, and who gathered 31 paintings and more than a hundred prints. Meyer died in 1916, and that same year his heirs, Gerda Nyquist and Finn Koller Meyer, gave the whole collection to the town. It has been on public view in a building of its own since 1924.