Ingse Vibe

By 1903 Munch was living mostly in Germany, where the Berlin Secession had given his Frieze of Life a room to itself the year before. Summers he came back to Åsgårdstrand, a small timber town on the Oslo fjord where he had bought a cottage. One day that year a girl in her teens stopped at his garden fence there. She was Ingse Vibe, from a family that summered nearby, and she sat for him repeatedly afterwards, in paint and in print. Here she has the full height of a canvas 160 centimetres tall, a dark dress against a dark ground. She went on to act on the stage in the capital, then still called Kristiania, and the two of them were still writing to each other decades later.