Les femmes sur le pont

Asgardstrand is a small bathing town on the Oslofjord where Munch bought a fisherman's cottage in 1898, and the bridge in this picture is the wooden jetty along its shore. He painted that same stretch again and again from the late 1890s into the 1920s, changing the age of the figures, the season and the colour, and keeping the long diagonal of the railing. By 1903 he was based mostly in Germany and showing widely there and in Paris, and Asgardstrand was where he went for the summer. This version stayed with the artist's family after his death and was sold at auction for the first time in 2002.