Summer Evening

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Artist: Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863–1944)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 150.2 × 195.3 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

In the summer of 1889 Munch settled by Åsgårdstrand on the west side of the Oslo fiord. Here, he staged his tales of absence and loneliness with theatre critic Sigurd Bødtker and his youngest sister Inger as models. Accurate resemblance is, however, unimportant. She appears as a middle-aged, disillusioned woman whose closed-up body language provides an icy foil to the posing aesthete.

The painting is an example of Munch’s break with realism. Paints are applied in rapid, transparent brushstrokes that disengage colour from objects, imbuing it with painterly value in its own right. He also makes the bold move of working with a vertical division of the picture plane, employing the contrast between the sunlit landscape and the dark porch to poignant effect.