Garden

Garden subjects occupied a specific place in Munch's plein-air practice, offering a more intimate and bounded outdoor space than his open coastal and forest landscapes. In 1902, Munch was spending time at Åsgårdstrand and also in Lübeck and Berlin, and gardens in both Norway and Germany provided him with material for more directly observational work. The ordered, cultivated space of a garden — with its paths, flowerbeds, and seasonal change — offered different compositional problems from the elemental simplicities of rock, sea, and sky that dominated his Norwegian coastal work. Munch's garden paintings are among the less frequently discussed works in his oeuvre, but they document a dimension of his practice in which pure visual pleasure and compositional experiment took precedence over psychological symbolism. His closest comparable in this mode was perhaps the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose quiet domestic subjects offered a similarly restrained Scandinavian counterpart to French Impressionist garden painting.

Munch applies a relatively bright green-dominated palette to the garden subject, the foliage and garden plants rendered in varied greens and the space organized by the natural structure of a planted garden rather than the more open composition of his coastal scenes. The handling is direct and confident.