|
The present painting dates to summer 1891, which Munch spent at the seaside resort of Åsgårdstrand. The artist's closest companions there were his first teacher Christian Krohg, a realist painter and a fixture of the Kristiania-Bohème, along with Krohg's wife Oda; the youngsters in the present scene, shown picking berries, are the Krohgs' two-year-old son Per and a friend.
Around 1890 Munch absorbed the plein air ethos of Impressionism in Paris where he encountered the latest work of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. The theme of children in a garden was popular among the French Impressionists; Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot had all painted their own offspring in this way.
Munch demonstrated an Impressionist's sensitivity to light as well in this early-evening vignette, capturing the last rays of the sun as they illuminate the bend in the path. The impact of Divisionism is felt principally in the heightened colour contrasts, particularly the pairing of complementary hues - red against green, blue against orange - on the right side of the canvas.
The quiet charm of this plein air scene stands in marked opposition to the artist's own psychic distress during the summer of 1891. Oda Krohg's ongoing affair at Åsgårdstrand with the writer Jappe Nilssen brought back for Munch excruciatingly painful memories of his own earlier liaison with a married woman, Millie Thaulow, which had left him jealous and humiliated. In the present canvas, only the deepening violet shadows hint at Munch's profound melancholia, which he assuaged throughout the summer with copious doses of absinthe, brandy, and champagne.
It was in 1889 that Edvard Munch spent the first of many summers in Åsgårdstrand. In 1898 he bought a house built at the end of the 18th century. The house is now a small museum, open to the public where everything has been retained as it was when the artist lived there.
| 
