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In January 1921 the director of the Freia chocolate factory in Kristiania came to Munch with a commission, paintings for the two canteens where his workers ate. Munch was 57 and living at Ekely on the edge of the city, and over the next two years he produced 12 panels for the larger dining room, the one used by the women. This canvas is from that same first year and was never part of that job. The kiss on a shore was a subject he had been painting since the 1890s, and here the couple's faces run into one another and the pair merge with the branches of the tree beside them. The Oslo stockbroker Rolf Stenersen, who knew Munch and later wrote a short book about him, owned it before it went to Houston in 1968.