Paysage de plage

In April 1889 Munch showed more than 100 of his own works in a hall in Kristiania, a one-man exhibition on a scale no Norwegian painter had attempted before. It won him a state travel scholarship. He spent that summer down the fjord at Asgardstrand, painting outdoors on pine boards barely larger than a sheet of writing paper, and this stretch of shore is one of them. It hangs in Cologne now, on long-term loan from a Swiss foundation whose collection went to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. In October he left for Paris, and in November word reached him there that his father had died. That same shoreline kept returning in his painting for the next 20 years, in the bridge and summer-night pictures that made his name.