夕暮れの風景の中の女性

In the winter before this was painted, Munch was living in a rented room at Saint-Cloud outside Paris on a Norwegian state grant, and he wrote himself an instruction. No more interiors with men reading and women knitting. He would paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love. This canvas comes from 1890, the first full year he worked under that rule, and the approach is already visible: one figure set in a landscape at dusk, mood carrying the subject and the detail pared away. He was 26. In November of that year, travelling back to France on a renewed grant, he fell ill with rheumatic fever at Le Havre and spent Christmas in hospital there.