Two Nudes Standing by a Chest of Drawers

This unusual interior double nude from 1903 departs from the more symbolically weighted treatment of the female body that characterized Munch's major figure compositions of the 1890s. Two women stand naturally in a domestic space furnished with a chest of drawers, their nudity presented with more matter-of-fact observation than psychological theater. The comparison with contemporaries is instructive: Edgar Degas had been painting women in domestic interiors throughout the 1880s and 1890s with similar matter-of-factness, and Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard were in these same years creating intimate interior figure subjects of great psychological subtlety. Munch's version has a different quality — less patterned and decorative than the Nabis, more directly physical than Degas — but it shows his capacity to inhabit a mode of figure painting that was not organized around symbolic anxiety. The Westphalian State Museum in Münster holds this as an example of his broader figurative range.

The two figures are rendered with warm flesh tones against the cooler backdrop of the domestic interior. Munch applies paint with his typical directness, modelling form through tonal variation rather than careful anatomical finish. The chest of drawers provides a domestic anchor and a block of warm colour that grounds the composition alongside the figures.