Noche en Saint-Cloud

In December 1889, cholera pushed Edvard Munch out of Paris. He rented rooms above a cafe in Saint-Cloud, on the Seine, and there, only weeks after word reached him that his father had died back in Norway, he painted this. The seated man in the top hat is not Munch but a friend who sat for him, the Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein. The room is nearly black. Almost all its light is the cold blue of the moon through the tall window, and the shadow the window bars cast on the floor falls in the shape of a cross. Munch was 26 that winter, grieving and far from home, and the mood in the picture is his own.