Akerselva

Munch was 18 when he painted this. He had walked out of technical college two years earlier to become a painter, against his father's wishes, and in the autumn of 1882 he and six other beginners rented a shared studio in the middle of Kristiania, as Oslo was called then. The older painter Christian Krohg looked in to correct their canvases. The Akerselva is the river that runs through the city, and by the 1880s it drove the mills and textile works along its banks, which is what the tall chimneys at the right belong to. Everything else is handled with great care, a yellow house doubled in still water, a few willows leaning out, a small figure in red on the bank. The Munch Museum in Oslo has it among the earliest paintings he kept.