SNØ

Painted on Jeløya, a quiet agricultural peninsula in the Oslofjord south of Oslo, Snow belongs to one of the most fertile and transformative periods of Munch's long career.

In 1908, after years of mounting psychological crisis, Munch voluntarily admitted himself to Dr. Daniel Jacobson's clinic in Copenhagen. He emerged in 1909 profoundly changed, and turned his gaze permanently back to Norway — settling in the coastal landscapes of the Oslofjord region. Where the 1890s had produced the existential intensity of the Frieze of Life — The Scream, Madonna, Vampire — this new phase brought a different kind of radicalism: open skies, winter fields, and the elemental Norwegian light translated through a palette that owes as much to Fauvism as to Northern Expressionism.

Snow was painted circa 1913–15, during repeated stays on Jeløya. The island's gently rolling landscape, beech forests, and the flat coastal light reflecting off frozen ground provide the painting's precise topography. A single bare tree — rendered with extraordinary directness in deep Prussian blue — anchors the centre of the composition. Beyond it, the snowfield dissolves into lilac shadow and distant warmth: an orange horizon, a darkened haystack, the cold suggestion of water. The palette is limited but exact. This is winter not as metaphor but as phenomenon, observed with the eye of someone who understood cold light.

The work was first exhibited at Blomqvist Kunsthandel in Kristiania in 1915 — very possibly the same season it was completed. It passed directly from its first owner on Jeløya through a sequence of the most distinguished names in twentieth-century Expressionism: Fritz Nathan and Peter Nathan in Zürich; Galerie Henze & Ketterer in Switzerland; Marlborough Fine Art in London. Most recently, it was included in Bonnard and the Nordics at the Nationalmuseum Stockholm and Lillehammer Kunstmuseum in 2025, confirming its continued institutional relevance.