The World of Edvard Munch

Ray Weight (loc. cit.) records that the artist considered that the present work ''does capture the atmosphere of Norway. The characters are neurotic and overwrought. In choosing my colours my purpose was to achieve an intensity, the bright light clashing with a tensed-up human situation'... Munch's Nordic lights play across the panel, a painting based on a black-and-white photograph of Munch at his easel painting in his garden at Asgardstrand. Weight was right to think it would be a good subject for a picture. His painting is an intense, dramatic version of the photo. Colour and some practical alterations make a difference, of course. But he supplies an angst, edginess and distraction, absent from the photo, to convey his concept of the female-dominated World of Munch.

Anxious women are watching the flight of a girl who, with her hair streaming behind her, rushes from the scene. A sister is seated posing, uneasy and distracted, for her brother. A second stands in the doorway, lost in dreamy reverie. All contribute to create a world wholly divorced from Munch's world of art. He sits hatted and muffled, encased in the self-sufficiency of genius, separate from yet part of the distracted female world under the chill brilliance of the Scandinavian summer'.