Paesaggio al chiaro di luna

1891 was the third year running that Munch held a state grant from Norway, and he spent much of it away, wintering in the south of France and coming back north for the summer. The landscapes he made around Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, are small and quiet, painted along the fjord at Nordstrand just south of town.

The moon in them behaves in a way that became his. Instead of a broken shimmer over the water, the reflection falls as one straight vertical column, with the disc of the moon set above it. He had the arrangement by the early 1890s and used it for decades afterwards, in the summer-night pictures with figures standing on the shore and in the ones with nobody in them at all. It runs straight down the middle of The Voice, the summer-night canvas he painted two years later.