17 мая в небольшом норвежском городке

The 17th of May 1919 was the first Constitution Day Norway kept after a war it had stayed out of. Neutrality had not been cheap. German submarines sank around half the Norwegian merchant fleet and roughly 2,000 Norwegian sailors died, a great many of them from small coastal towns like this one. That same winter the influenza pandemic was still moving through the country, and Munch had caught it himself. He painted his own hollowed face that year as well. The holiday he chose here is the one Norwegian national day that belongs to children rather than to soldiers, a parade of schoolchildren with flags up the main street. Munch was 55 by then and living at Ekely on the edge of Kristiania, as Oslo was still called, in a property he had bought three years earlier and never left.