해변의 잉에르

Munch painted this in the summer of 1889, at the little fishing town of Aasgaardstrand on the Oslo fjord, where northern summer nights barely go dark. The young woman on the rock is his youngest sister, Inger, then in her teens, sitting in a white dress with a straw hat in her hands. Behind her the sea and stones are painted in muted blues, greens and violets, the colours of a Nordic evening that never quite becomes night. He was 25 and still a few years from the Frieze of Life pictures that made his name, but the stillness is already here, that sense of a solitary figure turned inward. It went to a Bergen collector, Rasmus Meyer, whose collection still holds it today.