Spiaggia

By 1904 Munch had already made his name with the anxious pictures of the Frieze of Life, and he kept returning to one small stretch of Norwegian coast at Åsgårdstrand, a modest summer resort on the Oslo fjord where he had spent seasons since the 1890s. He once said that walking through the town was like walking through his own paintings. This shore, with its rounded pale stones, turns up again and again in his work as the setting for lovers and lonely figures. Here the rocks almost take over the canvas, flattened into a pattern of soft grey and blue shapes. He bought a small house in the town, and it still stands as a Munch site today.