Landscape with a Road

Landscape with a Road by Edvard Munch from 1901 depicts a country road cutting through the Norwegian landscape — a subject that places Munch within the tradition of road-as-compositional-device that runs from Dutch seventeenth-century landscape through to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. A road through a landscape creates perspective and implied movement, inviting the viewer's eye to travel through the painting and suggesting the possibility of journey. Munch's Norwegian country roads, with their characteristic quality of summer light and the specific character of the fjord-region landscape — birch trees, meadows, the distant hills — gave him a subject simultaneously familiar and expressive.

Munch uses the road's perspectival recession to organize the landscape composition, the converging lines of the road surface drawing the eye into the picture space. His handling of the surrounding landscape uses his characteristic directional strokes to convey the quality of Norwegian summer light and the specific textures of the region's vegetation.