At the General Store in Vrengen

At the General Store in Vrengen of 1888 at the Lillehammer Art Museum is a rare interior genre scene from Munch's early production — the informal social life of a Norwegian village community gathered in a local shop, treated with the observation-based fidelity to contemporary social reality that Norwegian Naturalism had championed. Vrengen, near Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord, was part of the coastal community Munch frequented in his summers, and this canvas documents an aspect of that community's social life that his more celebrated outdoor and intimate subjects never address. Christian Krohg's commitment to depicting working and lower-class Norwegian life as serious painting subjects influenced this kind of documentary social scene, though Munch's handling already shows independence from Krohg's more programmatically Realist approach. The Lillehammer Art Museum, one of Norway's significant regional institutions with a strong Norwegian painting collection, holds this as an example of Munch's range within his early Naturalist phase.

The interior artificial light — warmer and more directional than the outdoor light of his coastal paintings — is handled with a Rembrandtesque concentration on a central lit zone surrounded by deeper shadow. The figures are relatively freely painted, their features and clothes summarised rather than described in laborious detail.