拉斐特街

In the spring of 1891 Munch was living in Paris, in rented rooms at number 49 on the Rue Lafayette, and he painted the view straight down from his own balcony. A man in dark clothes leans on the iron railing at the front of the picture while the street rushes away beneath him in quick, broken strokes of colour, all movement and sunlight. This is Munch borrowing, on purpose, from the French painters he was studying that year, Pissarro and Monet and Caillebotte, who had made a whole art out of looking down on Paris streets from above. It is worth remembering what came just after. Within about two years the same painter would stop looking outward at bright boulevards altogether and paint The Scream. Here, for the moment, none of that is in sight. There is only a man on a balcony on a bright day, watching the traffic go by.