House in Borre

House in Borre from 1904 depicts a building in or near the small town of Borre, south of Åsgårdstrand on the Oslofjord, where Munch had connections through friends and extended stays. Borre was known for its Viking-age burial mounds, and the area's combination of ancient landscape and modest Norwegian wooden architecture gave Munch a setting quite different from the tourist resort character of Åsgårdstrand. House paintings are among Munch's more relaxed subjects — buildings lacking the charged human presence of his figure works, they allowed him to explore compositional and coloristic problems without symbolic weight. The work's current location suggests private ownership or an untraced museum holding.

Munch renders the house with a directness appropriate to a plein-air study, the wooden building's structure defined by broad strokes of paint that capture its mass and the quality of light on its walls without laboring architectural detail. The surrounding landscape is handled in complementary loose strokes.