Children in a Flowery Meadow

Edvard Munch's 'Children in a Flowery Meadow' (1902) depicts a pastoral scene of childhood innocence — the children in a flowering meadow creating one of his most benign and celebratory subjects, the natural abundance of the summer meadow and the children's freedom within it providing material for a gentler engagement with childhood than his more anguished subjects. His sustained investigation of childhood's specific quality of innocent experience found in the flowery meadow a natural and joyful context.

Munch renders the children in the meadow with the atmospheric freedom of his best outdoor subjects — the figures in the flower-dotted meadow depicted with the loose, expressive handling that gave his outdoor subjects their quality of natural presence. His palette in the flowery meadow subject is characteristically colorful and warm, the flowers' colors and the summer light creating a composition of unusual chromatic richness within his usually more restrained subject world.