Au travail près de la serre

Ekely, the property Munch bought outside Kristiania in 1916, was a working market garden of about eleven acres, with an orchard, a plant nursery and a glasshouse. He kept it in production and paid people to do the work, and he painted them at it more than once. This canvas from 1924 shows the ground beside the greenhouse being turned over. He was 60 that year and had been on the place for eight years, long enough that the hired hands and the fruit trees had become as much his subject as anything he went out to find. The picture travelled south to the museum at Stavanger in 1949, five years after his death.