The Girls on the Bridge

Edvard Munch returned repeatedly to the motif of young women on a bridge at Åsgårdstrand, a small Norwegian coastal town he visited regularly from the 1880s onward. 'The Girls on the Bridge' (1901) is one of several versions he made of this composition across two decades, each slightly different in colour and mood. The scene carries Munch's characteristic blend of the everyday and the uncanny — girls in summer dresses, a calm fjord, yet an atmosphere of threshold and transition. The National Museum in Oslo holds this version, which is among the most lyrical of Munch's treatments of feminine adolescence and the liminal space between childhood and womanhood.

Munch structures the composition around the strong vertical of the bridge railing and the curved reflections in the water below. Colour is applied in broad areas of harmonising tones — greens, whites, and warm yellows — with visible brushstrokes that give the surface a rhythmic energy. The figures are simplified into silhouettes, their faces turned away, emphasising mood over individual identity.