Girls on the Bridge

Girls on the Bridge (Pikene på broen) is an oil painting on canvas by Edvard Munch, signed and dated 1902 at upper right and measuring 101 × 102.5 cm; it belongs to a private collection.

The setting is the jetty at Åsgårdstrand, a small summer resort on the Oslofjord where Munch rented a holiday house from 1889 and bought one of his own in 1897. The motif became one of his most repeated: he painted about a dozen oil versions, starting in 1901 with a canvas now in the National Museum in Oslo, and also made etchings, lithographs and woodcuts of it. Other versions are in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Bergen collections and the Munch Museum. According to Sotheby's, this 1902 picture is one of only two oil versions still privately owned.

Compared with the 1901 painting, with its soft summer-night light, this version is lit evenly and brightly. Four girls in red, yellow, white and dark dresses huddle on the boardwalk, which runs steeply into depth much as the railing does in The Scream. Munch turned his back on the fjord and looked up the jetty to the white wall, the houses and the big dark tree reflected in the water. He painted it in the year his Frieze of Life was exhibited at the Berlin Secession, and he reported that Max Liebermann thought it his best painting when he showed it in Berlin.

The canvas belonged to Otto Schultz of Steinkjer by 1915, when it was shown at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco as Summer Night in Aasgaardstrand. It later passed through the Oslo collector Ragnar Moltzau, Norton Simon and Wendell and Dorothy Cherry. It sold for $7.7 million in 1996 and $30.8 million in 2008, and on 14 November 2016 it fetched $54.5 million at Sotheby's New York, then the second-highest auction price for Munch. It was a highlight of the opening of the Museum Barberini in Potsdam in January 2017, and the buyer is reported to be the museum's founder, Hasso Plattner.