On the Bridge

The scenery depicted in this rare lithograph of 1912-13 was very familiar to Edvard Munch. It is the jetty leading out to the steamship landing at Åsgårdstrand, towards the mouth of the Oslo Fjord, where the artist kept a small house, which can still be visited. In variations, this place became a perennial motif in his oeuvre. He first depicted this location, also seen from the jetty towards the town, in two paintings of 1901. In these paintings, three girls are standing by the balustrade gazing towards the land. In a slightly later painted version (circa 1903), the girls are replaced by a small group of women standing in conversation in the middle of the bridge. It is this scene which Munch depicted in the present lithograph, for the first and only time in the print medium, while he repeated the motif of the girls leaning against the railing in four different prints: first in a small etching of 1903 (Woll 232), then in a small woodcut of 1905 (Woll 271) and finally several years later, in 1918-20, in two closely related prints, a woodcut and a lithograph (Woll 628 & 629). While these prints, with their narrower focus and oblique viewpoint, convey a sense of claustrophobia and forlorness, the image of the women gathered in a circle on the jetty, in their bright summer dresses and hats, is a more spacious composition and a much happier image.
Munch seems to have enjoyed experimenting with this lithograph: of the small number of impressions, two are printed in blue, some are handcoloured and most are printed on white paper. For the present example, Munch chose a silky, bluish-grey Japan paper, whose soft tonality imbues the peaceful scene with the twilight of a nordic evening.