Veierland near Tønsberg

Veierland near Tønsberg of 1887, in the National Gallery of Norway, is an early landscape by the twenty-three-year-old Munch, painted in the coastal area near Tønsberg on the western side of the Oslofjord where his family spent summer months. In 1887, Munch was still in the formative phase of his development, deeply influenced by the Norwegian Naturalist tradition exemplified by Fritz Thaulow and Christian Krohg, whose plein air approach to Norwegian landscape was the dominant mode in Oslo's artistic milieu. The Veierland landscape shows the young artist working within this inherited tradition before his decisive encounters with French Post-Impressionism in the early 1890s would transform his pictorial aims. The work's relative calm contrasts sharply with the psychological charge that would define his mature output.

The early Naturalist technique is evident in the relatively even tonality, the attention to atmospheric conditions over the coastal landscape, and the painting's concern with light on water and rocks that characterised Norwegian plein air practice. The brushwork is varied and responsive without the expressive distortion that would later become Munch's signature mode.