Notte d'estate. La sirena

The curved strip of shore here is Asgardstrand, a small bathing village on the Oslofjord where Munch spent his summers from the late 1880s. The same line of beach comes back again and again in his work, usually with a pale figure on it and a column of light lying on the water. He painted this in 1893, a year spent mostly in Berlin, working up Norwegian summer nights from memory for a German public that had shut down his first exhibition there after a week. The mermaid was common currency in the 1890s, a stock figure of Symbolist painting all over Europe. Munch gave her the green of the water she lies in, and set the sunset burning orange behind her hair.