房子着火了！

A farm called Abbediengen stood next to the property Munch owned on the western edge of Oslo, and its main house burned down. Munch got there among the first and, by one account, helped fight the fire. Then he painted it, with women in the foreground and the building alight behind them.

The date is not settled. The museum's catalogue has long carried 1925, and the canvas used to go under the title Fire at the Hospital, because the women in front were taken for nurses. Local research has since put the Abbediengen fire on Wednesday 31 August 1927, and matched the composition to a photograph that Aftenposten, the Oslo daily, printed just after it, which suggests Munch worked partly from the newspaper.

He offered the picture to the man who owned the burned farm, remarking that the place had never looked so picturesque. The owner did not want it.